Chapter 4: Sharing ideas with parents about key child development concepts
Widen your reading by taking a look at this list of useful journal articles.
Abstract: This study addressed teachers’ and parents’ perceptions of the meanings and functions of parent involvement. Twelve teachers and 13 parents participated in semistructured ethnographic interviews. All actors were either employed by or involved in an ethnically concentrated elementary school in a low-income, culturally diverse, urban community. Analyses revealed that teachers and parents have different perceptions of parent involvement. These different perceptions implicate diverse epistemologies, differential power, and some competing purposes. On the other hand, teachers and parents both claim that firm, mutually beneficial partnerships (or collaboration) between them are essential to children’s learning, healthy development, and success in school. Perceived barriers need to be addressed for these partnerships to eventuate.
Abstract: Changing times and postmodern perspectives have disrupted the taken-for-granted relationship between child development knowledge and the preparation of early childhood teachers. Despite ongoing exchanges about how best to respond to the critique of the developmental knowledge base, few descriptions of how particular teacher educators have gone about reconceptualising their curriculum exist. Employing postmodern views of knowledge, power, and subjectivity, this article describes three pedagogies employed by the authors to enact a postmodern teacher education. After describing each of these pedagogies – situating knowledge, multiple readings, and engaging with images – an example from classroom practice is given to illustrate how these strategies come together to assist students to understand how teaching enacts power relations. The article concludes with a discussion of some of the challenges involved in trying to shift from developmental to postmodern practices in the preparation of early childhood educators.