Description
This volume examines the emotional world of the early childhood classroom as it affects young children (whose emotional wellbeing is crucial to successful learning), educators (for whom teaching is never a solely cognitive act), parents, and administrators. In a culture where issues such as bullying and teacher burnout comprise major challenges to student success, this book brings together diverse voices (researchers, practitioners, children, and parents) and multiple perspectives (theoretical and personal) to refocus attention on the pivotal role of emotion in schools.
To do so, editors Samara Madrid, David Fernie, and Rebecca Kantor envision emotion as a dynamic, fluid, and negotiated construct, performed and produced in the daily lives of children and adults alike. A nuanced yet cohesive analysis, Reframing the Emotional Worlds of the Early Childhood Classroom thus presents a challenge to the overriding concern with quantifiable classroom achievement that increasingly threatens to push the emotional lives of classroom participants to the margins of educational and public discourse.
Table of Contents
Chapter 1: Introduction to reframing emotion. Samara Madrid, David E. Fernie, and Rebecca Kantor Just Practices and Emotional Discomfort
Chapter 2: A family, a fire, and a framework: Emotions in an anti-bias school community. Caryn Park, Debbie LeeKeenan, and Heidi Given
Commentary: Patricia Ramsey
Chapter 3: Guinea pigs, Asperger’s Syndrome, and my son: When teachers struggle to recognize humanity. Steve Bialostok
Commentary: Margarita Bianco
Chapter 4: Food fight: Difficult negotiations between adults in an early childhood center. Susan Twombly
Commentary: Tamar Jacobson
Place and Spaces for Emotional Intimacy and Challenge
Chapter 5: Recognizing, respecting and reconsidering the emotions of conflict. Ellen Hall and Alison Maher
Commentary: Mary Jane Moran
Chapter 6: How to hold a hummingbird: Using stories to make space for the emotional lives of children in a public school classroom. Melissa Tonachel
Commentary: Laurie Katz
Chapter 7: The woods as a toddler classroom: The emotional experience of challenge, connection, and caring. Dee Smith and Jeanne Goldhaber
Commentary: John Nimmo
Understanding Emotion Within Roles and Relationships
Chapter 8: Critical friends work through the emotions of beginning teaching together. David Fernie
Commentary: Barbara Seidl
Chapter 9: Emotional intersections in early childhood leadership. Nikki Baldwin
Commentary: Holly Elissa Bruno
Chapter 10: Promoting peer relations for young children with Autism Spectrum Disorder: The LEAP preschool experience. Phillip S. Strain and Edward H. Bovey
Commentary: Michelle Buchanan
Contributors
Index
