(Re)Visioning Teacher Preparation in Swiftly Changing Times: One Early Childhood Education Program's Journey

• In Event: Roundtable Session 55
  In Roundtable Session: Rethinking Program Design to Achieve the Diverse Aims of Teacher Preparation

Abstract

We present a documentary account of the process of an early childhood teacher preparation program in (re)visioning to rebuild our program around a culturally sustaining pedagogy (Paris, 2012) and incorporative of a horizontal distribution of expertise (Zeichner, Payne & Brayko, 2015). The major goals of the process were to build a program that is authentically centered on young children and their diverse developmental and learning needs (particularly language development and bilingualism/biliteracy), that focuses on teacher candidates (TCs) and how to best support their development, and that meets the needs of the larger employment/professional context. Further we emphasize the need for ECE professionals to embody the responsibility for educating the whole child, ALL children, and the normalization of “difference.”

Authors

• Jennifer J. Mueller, University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee

• Leanne M. Evans, University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee

• Nancy K. File, University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee