Graduate School of Education

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  Reframing Deficit Narratives to Honor the Community Cultural Wealth of Immigrant Families of Children with Disabilities

  Soyoung Park

  Existing research suggests that immigrant families navigating the special education process are rarely positioned as powerful partners working alongside educators. This is a manifestation of the racism and ableism endemic to the United States schooling system that leads to educators viewing immigrant families from a deficit-based lens. Do these perceptions, however, match the ways that immigrant families view themselves? This qualitative participant-observation study addresses this question by exploring educators’ and families’ perceptions and positionings of immigrant families who are navigating special education. I unpack discrepant views among educators and families of 16 children labeled “English Learner” with or suspected of having disabilities. The findings indicate that the immigrant families see themselves as possessing tremendous community cultural wealth (Yosso, 2005), which counters the deficit-oriented view the educators have of them. I argue for a reframing of the common narratives surrounding immigrant families in special education away from deficit-based conceptions towards ones that honor the strengths, knowledge, and assets of the families.

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  The Use of Culturally Sustaining Practices in Play to Foster Resilience

  Genevieve Lowry

  Children present in the hospital with an array of previous experiences. Play specialists must learn to help children use experiences as opportunities for growth and coping and be prepared when significant life events emerge as part of a child's play. Ecological models provide a framework for understanding children's lived experiences affecting development and offering insight into children and families responses to stress. Foundational theories of play provide knowledge of children's development, interests, and understanding of themselves and the world. This chapter examines two culturally sustaining models that build on play theories viewing children and families through a strengths-based lens that includes culture, traditions, spiritual, and community support to facilitate assessments and interventions. Converging ecological models and culturally sustaining pedagogies with play deepens the play specialists' understanding and ability to identify strengths, build relationships, and discover family and community support leading to children's meaning making and resilience.

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  Play's Continuum of Needs: Building Blocks for Deepening Play Opportunities in Medical Environments

  Deborah Brewster Vilas

  Optimal healing for children in hospitals occurs when their developmental needs are considered as part of their overall treatment plan. One of the most pressing developmental needs for all children is the need to play, and this remains so even when they are confined to a hospital bed or face developmental delays or disabilities. This chapter examines the most basic components of implementing play programs in hospitals, such as the intentional creation of space for play, determining the best times for children to play, and exploring what types of play are therapeutic and possible in a hospital environment. The author presents a continuum that highlights foundational components of a therapeutic play program and explores a wide range of types of play, including examples that arise .from a variety of cultures. Child life specialists and hospital play specialists are in a unique position to improve patient experiences and health outcomes by interacting with children using their primary language: the language of play.

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  The Role of Child Life Specialists in Community Settings: Chapter 6: Prison

  Genevieve Lowry

  This chapter focuses on the role of the child life specialist working with families affected by incarceration. Children and families are at increased risk due to trauma exacerbated by arrests, incarceration, and re-entry. This chapter will focus on the ways a child life specialist working in jails, prisons, detention centers, and in communities with schools, non-profits, and faith-based organizations can provide developmentally appropriate explanations, preparation, play, expressive arts, and coping, facilitating opportunities that foster relationships and understanding while promoting resilience.

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  The Occasional Paper Series: An Open Access Journal Transforming Educational Research Across the Globe

  Gail Boldt

  In February 2021, the Occasional Paper Series exceeded 100,000 downloads. What started out as a print publication in 1999 relaunched in 2012 as an online, open public access publication hosted by Bank Street College of Education, which expanded access to its high-quality, peer-reviewed research. The series is proud to have reached this digital milestone, maintaining that “access to scholarly research is a social good that should be available to everyone.”

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  Adapting a Critical Friends Consultancy to a Virtual Environment

  Rebecca Cheung, Jennifer Robinson, Rebecca Rufo-Tepper, and Jessica Charles

  This inquiry brief explores how a cross-institutional consultancy project examining anti-racist teacher and leader preparation adapted to a virtual environment amid COVID-19.

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  Reconceptualizing Assistance for Young Children of Color With Disabilities in an Inclusion Classroom

  Soyoung Park

  In this article, we draw on DisCrit to critically analyze how a group of early childhood educators approached assistance with young children of color with disabilities in a Head Start inclusion classroom. Using examples from data collected over one school year, we demonstrate how child-centered assistance advances justice for young children of color with disabilities who are often subjected to a surveillance culture in schools. We critique assistance that aligns with the medical model of disability and aims to change young children of color with disabilities to conform to ableist, racist expectations of schooling. We offer examples of assistance practices that contrastingly aim to support young children of color with disabilities to pursue their own interests and purposes. Through these counterstories, we reconceptualize assistance as a practice that can support young children of color with disabilities to be more fully themselves.

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  EdPrepLab as a Learning Community

  Jessica Charles and Rebecca Rufo-Tepper

  As part of EdPrepLab’s work to strengthen educator preparation in the United States, network members from across the country partnered to form inquiry groups—each comprised of a cross- or intra-institutional team—focused on collaboratively exploring a topic related to deeper learning and equity. This brief summarizes the proposals of each group and highlights the line(s) of inquiry, scope of work, and intended outcomes of each project.

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  Reflections on Developing a Cross-Institutional Inquiry Project

  Rebecca Cheung, Jennifer Robinson, Rebecca Rufo-Tepper, and Jessica Charles

  Jennifer Robinson, Executive Director of the Center for Pedagogy at Montclair State University and Rebecca Cheung, Director of the Principal Leadership Institute at the University of California, Berkeley, are helping to lead a collaborative inquiry group comprised of three different institutions: Montclair State University, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley). This brief captures protocols and processes they used to support effective collaboration in the design of their inquiry project proposal.

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  Reflections on Developing a Cross-Institutional Team

  Rebecca Cheung, Jennifer Robinson, Rebecca Rufo-Tepper, and Jessica Charles

  Today’s educators need to develop the knowledge, skills, and disposition to support all students in deeper learning. Educator Preparation Laboratory (EdPrepLab) works to strengthen educator preparation in the United States by building the collaborative capacity of preparation programs, school districts, and state policymakers. Through cross-programmatic sharing of innovative practices, including models and artifacts of educator preparation practice, EdPrepLab’s network of preparation programs helps build leadership and high-quality practice through collaboration, research, and documentation.

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  Do States’ Immigrant-Friendly Policies Improve the Health of Children of Immigrants? The Impact of Driver’s License Policies for Undocumented Immigrants and “Sanctuary” Policies on Access and Use of Health Care

  Heather Koball and Seth Hartig

  If 10.5 million undocumented immigrants are unable or afraid to access health care, medical needs will go unmet and, in the face of COVID-19, lives may be lost. This report explores how immigrant-friendly policies increase the chances that children of immigrants receive preventative health care, thus reducing the likelihood of having unmet medical needs and potentially reducing the chances of disease outbreaks.

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  Young Children in Deep Poverty: Racial/Ethnic Disparities and Child Well-Being Compared to Other Income Groups

  Sheila Smith, Sophie Nguyen, and Maribel R. Granja

  This report compares early health, development, and risk indicators for young children in deep poverty to indicators for young children in other income groups. The results show that young children in deep poverty experience exceptional challenges that make them vulnerable to poor long-term outcomes. The report also highlights large disparities in the prevalence of deep poverty across five racial/ethnic groups, nationally and state by state.

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  Feelings Charts Instead of Behavior Charts: Radical Love Instead of Shame

  Margaret Blachly and Noelle Dean

  In this article, the authors introduce some core concepts and language of Emotionally Responsive Practice at Bank Street , an approach to working with children developed based on deep knowledge of child development and a respect for children’s life experience (Koplow, 2002, 2007, 2009).

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  Performance Assessment of Aspiring School Leaders Grounded in an Epistemology of Practice: A Case Study

  Jessica E. Charles, Rebecca Cheung, and Kristin Rosekrans

  There is increasing interest in the field of leadership preparation about the opportunities that robust performance assessments may provide to capture and evaluate the complexity of school administrators’ work. Heretofore, the conversation about administrator performance assessment in leadership preparation has mainly centered on the development and impact of large statewide assessments that grow out of a Cartesian epistemology of individual knowledge possession, in which individuals must demonstrate mastery of a set of static knowledge and skills. We analyzed the characteristics of a performance assessment system that deliberately accounts for the organizational complexity of practice and knowledge generation in its design. Candidates are assessed by faculty and coaches on state-wide and program standards, but instead of producing evidence of their practice as individuals, they are assessed within simulated practice-based scenarios that require them to both draw on their extant individual and collective knowledge and build and act on new knowledge as they move through the simulation. Our analysis enables us to dimensionalize issues related to state mandated performance assessments and their implementation by preparation programs.

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  Descriptive Inquiry at Bank Street: Building Intellectual Community while Responding to Accreditation

  Jessica Charles

  Over the 2016-17 academic year, Bank Street Graduate School faculty and staff participated in a school-wide Descriptive Inquiry process to examine their programs and pedagogy. As part of the process, faculty met regularly to share their practices and to strengthen their well-established programs in teacher and leader preparation, museum education, and child life. Dean Cecelia Traugh initiated this process, drawing on her extensive experience implementing Descriptive Inquiry in higher education settings, in order to help faculty reflect on their practice, improve program quality, and build organizational coherence.

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  The Restaurant Study

  Jessica Charles

  Bank Street faculty and staff regularly work in partnership with public schools to support teachers and leaders sustain and strengthen their progressive educational practice. At Midtown West, a public elementary school founded in 1992 as a collaboration between parents in New York City’s District 2 and Bank Street faculty, Peggy McNamara has worked as a coach and thought partner with teachers across every grade.

  Over the course of developing and teaching one signature Midtown West curriculum unit called The Restaurant, we followed Peggy and the teachers as they made teaching decisions to engage and educate students through a study of food and community.

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  An Inquiry Into Creating and Supporting Engagement in Online Courses

  Robin Hummel, Genevieve Lowry, Troy Pinkney, and Laura Zadoff

  In this chapter, authors offer what they have discovered about creating and facilitating structures that support active engagement that promote social construction of knowledge in online interactions.

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  Bringing Joy to Uninspired Teachers of Math

  Hal Melnick

  This publication explores how to inspire teachers to find the joy in math so they can help their students do the same. Through a variety of tools, techniques, and helpful hints, the resource illustrates what high quality math instruction looks like and how teachers can reframe their own thinking about math to create deeper learning opportunities for their students.

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  Learning to Teach: Observing and Reflecting

  Nancy Nager

  This video series, “Learning to Teach,” provides a platform for professional development in early childhood education. It introduces viewers to compelling early childhood classroom footage accompanied by facilitated discussions about observations and teaching practices. You will get a hands-on look at how beginning teachers learn to closely observe children and engage in reflective conversations about children, materials, the classroom environment and themselves.

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  Learning to Look, Looking to Learn

  Karen Rothschild, Marvin Cohen, Babette Babette Moeller, Barbara Dubitsky, Nesta Marshall, and Matt McLeod

  In order to plan and implement lessons that will be effective for a wide variety of learners, teachers must assess what students know and how they know it. They must also know students’ academic strengths, challenges, and preferences. Careful observation of what students do and say as they work provides a rich source of data about both their knowledge and ways of learning. We highlight three strategies we use to help teachers refine their understanding of individual students:

  (a) building teachers’ skills in observing without making judgements; (b) teaching teachers to use a shared, neurodevelopmental framework through which to view student learning and behavior; and (c) facilitating collaboration among general education and special education teachers in using these tools to assess student learning and plan lessons.

  The combination of careful observations, a neurodevelopmental lens through which to see and interpret the observations, and the different perspectives of general and special education teachers, builds a foundation for planning appropriately leveled and rigorous lessons that leverage students’ strengths while supporting them in their weaker areas.

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  Promoting Shared Decision Making through Descriptive Inquiry

  Rachel Seher, Cecelia Traugh, and Alan Cheng

  This article describes the process through which faculty members at City-As-School, a progressive public high school in New York City, recently began to use descriptive inquiry to more fully actualize one of the school’s core values: a commitment to “democracy as a way of life” (Dewey 1939, 2).

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  Conceptualizing the Problems and Possibilities of Interprofessional Collaboration in Schools

  Susan I. Stone and Jessica Charles

  Recent educational programs and initiatives hinge on effective collaboration between education professionals, such as school social workers, school psychologists, teachers, and principals. The authors seek to build on prior conceptual work to explore the range of collaborative practices school social workers engage in with other school professionals. Drawing on conceptual frameworks related to interprofessional and other collaborative work in schools, the authors examined how school social workers (N=39) report collaborating with other professionals based on a hypothetical case designed to elicit collaborative practices. To triangulate the findings, the authors also draw on responses by 14 teachers, five school psychologists, and four principals. The authors identified five modes of collaboration: initiator/coordinator, assessor, intervener, whistleblower, and collaborator. The article concludes with a discussion o the implications for theory and practice.

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  Leading the Future of Museum Education [Denver Convening Report]

  Brian Hogarth

  In late-May, 2015, over one hundred museum education directors and program managers, along with several higher education faculty and consultants, met at the History Colorado Center in Denver to discuss the challenges and opportunities facing the profession. This report provides the highlights from the talks and discussions that took place, some of the principle findings from written activities and evaluations, as well as insights from follow-up meetings that took place in December 2015 in New York and Denver and in May 2016 at the American Alliance of Museums Conference in Washington DC. Also included is a list of resources related to some of the ideas discussed.

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  Using ERP Reflective Language and Relationship Based Practice Principles to Address Post-Election Anxiety in Young Children

  Lesley Koplow

  Helps teachers think about how they can ease anxiety in young children worried about what they have seen and heard during and after the presidential election.

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  Learning to Teach: Observing and Reflecting. Part 1: Routines and Transitions

  Nancy Nager

  In this video series you will get a hands-on look at how beginning teachers learn to closely observe children and engage in reflective conversations about children, materials, the classroom environment and themselves. The video has three parts: Classroom routines and transitions, dramatic play, and early childhood materials.