ABSTRACT
When I was an undergraduate student at the University of Missouri-Columbia, I threw myself into my newly adopted professional field of early childhood education (ECE) by becoming a member of the Association for Childhood Education International (ACEI) under the guidance and mentorship of Dr. Stevie Hoffman. Around my junior year of undergraduate studies, I was elected to ACEI’s executive board as a student representative. Intent on being well informed about the organization and my new responsibilities, I combed all the volumes of Childhood Education and historical documents of the International Kindergarten Union found in the library. These mapped the professional conversations and actions of the organization’s earliest leaders, such as Patty Smith Hill and Susan Blow. At the same time, I found myself at conference meetings surrounded by experienced teachers witnessing to one another of the beauty, joy, and heartache of teaching and learning with their students. What I discovered through the readings and ACEI members were stories of women committed to serving young children and passionate about providing the most dignified education and care to all young children. I learned quite a bit about curriculum and instruction through the traditional designated coursework prescribed by my university. Yet it was the stories that Stevie and her colleagues told of their years of teaching young children and the stories of these early leaders that may have influenced me the most. Piaget and Dewey may have held the highest honors in leading the way for practitioners through theory, but it was the stories of the teachers’ lives and their statements of wisdom that shaped me into the teacher I became (and am still becoming). I was reminded of Stevie and many other early childhood educator stories when I
was teaching an “Introduction to Early Childhood Education” course this past
semester. Our class was critically examining the family tree typically presented in textbooks of early childhood, beginning with Plato and Aristotle, jumping to Comenius, Pestalozzi, and Froebel, on to Dewey and Piaget. One young woman posed the following question: “What about all the teachers who actually taught children and implemented these theories? While these ideas about education sound good, I would really like to know what the teachers thought. What do real teachers think about curriculum?” These questions have been quite common throughout my years of working with
preservice teachers. I imagine that many new teachers are looking for examples of mentor teachers for inspiration and guidance. As Lascarides and Hinitz (2000) have suggested, our history helps define who we are as educators in the field of early childhood education. The stories shared about the educators who have preceded us can demonstrate how ideas about curriculum have evolved and provide the context for understanding the theories and practices related to curriculum. However, when we look at how the history of early childhood education is presented in texts and the dominant discourse, we see limited examples of teachers as innovators of curriculum. Thus, our view of the field and of curriculum remains limited for early childhood teachers. In this chapter I briefly highlight how our written history of early childhood
education often leaves the stories of teachers’ lives and contributions to curriculum unexamined. Then I share stories of teachers and others who are not usually presented in our condensed versions of history but who have influenced early childhood education and curriculum and whose lives have the potential to continue to influence how early childhood educators address curriculum. Much like Ayers (1992), I still believe “recovering the voice of the teacher-usually a woman, increasingly a person of color, often a member of the working poor-is an essential part of reconceptualizing the field of early childhood education” (p. 266). As the students in my class are fully aware, if anyone knows curriculum intimately and most deeply it must be the teacher. Yet, my undergraduate students also know full well that the teacher is often marginalized in the current American discourse of curriculum. As another student stated in a writing assignment:
I’m not trying to make enemies of school administrators and those who create legislation like NCLB [No Child Left Behind]. It is doubtful that these people are out to sabotage education and despise teachers and their opinions. However, the trend in education in the 21st century does not take into account the teacher’s perspective of how children learn and what they can achieve in the classroom.
