Leading From Wholeness: Nurturing Relationships While Navigating Timelines, Institutional and Individual Interests, Histories, and Hopes

• In Event: An Interdisciplinary Project to Strengthen and Transform the Preparation of the Next Generation of Educators

Abstract

A nine-person interdisciplinary team met regularly for two semesters to design a clinical experience for early childhood educators at a Bureau of Indian Education school. As we followed our partners’ lead to establish our relationship, a process that took over nine months, we began to develop a guiding framework as different threads of work developed. In this poster, we illustrate our process and the commitments we came to as we engaged with the one another and the school community. We highlight challenges and how we responded to them.

In our first meetings we discussed our individual expertise and what our aims were, then we had to define ourselves as a group. In a sense, our work has been to deconstruct ourselves as individual experts and reassemble our collective expertise in a way that would help us create innovation in early childhood education that best serves an Indigenous population. Each meeting was comprised of multiple timeline and learning trajectories and through the work we began to have knowledge-based “epiphanies” as to what we were trying to create; especially given the Pueblo culture, the context, and the opportunities for learning in the school with which we will be working.

The prevailing educational framework for student success continues to focus on K-12 reforms rather than discovering new approaches to support a paradigm that promotes a continuum of learning from birth that is well aligned with brain and socio-cultural research about the science of early learning. We worry that academic environments, including our own college, do not see early childhood education as rigorous and fundamental to shared goals set for student achievement. The disconnect in nurturing student success as a developmental process within a continuum of learning that is rooted in families works against effective educational preparation. Our response is based on the belief that student preparation requires deep understanding of strategies for authentic family and community engagement, which also is critical for elementary and secondary student success. Through navigating these and other challenges, our group seeks to understand what teacher preparation could look like when it is approached holistically from a child, family and community lens. Also, a few of our members are exploring how the project might inform us about the needs of schools in [State] and how it might influence our college’s graduate curriculum. Through these discussions, and grounded within our emerging theoretical framework, an 18 credit hour graduate certificate in behavioral and mental health interventions in schools was drafted for early childhood professionals.

The Pueblo community, children and educators are always in the forefront of our co-planning. A timeline of innovation is comprised of the mundane, the challenges and the bursts of insightful epiphanies that result from the collective narrative and discourse that emanates along the way. The process is a set of “deep conversational and intellectual moments,” which sets up and/or can lose momentum depending on how it is navigated and/or fostered. As we begin to implement our ideas we expect this process to continue.

Authors

• Kersti Tyson, University of New Mexico

• Cathy Gutierrez-Gomez, University of New Mexico

• Magdalena M. Avila, University of New Mexico

• Lois Vermilya, The University of New Mexico

• Kristopher Goodrich, The University of New Mexico

• David J. Atencio, University of New Mexico

• Ziarat Hossain, The University of New Mexico

• Matthew Lemberger-Truelove, The University of New Mexico

• Loretta Serna, University of New Mexico

• Christine P. Sims, University of New Mexico