The Teacher Story

The voices of early childhood educators have power. Our ability to make our practice visible is one of the best tools for advocacy. Telling a story touching on emotions and sharing a value about our work's importance impacts parents, communities, and policymakers alike.

Telling our stories takes little practice. Here are some tips to keep in mind.

Identify a classroom experience as an educator that resonated with you.

Reflect on what made that experience meaningful – connect that importance to a value you have about education –in my case, the value of trusting children and honoring their space and time to process a situation.

Develop a brief introduction to your experience that establishes your story.

Remove any identifying factors to protect children and families. Consistently demonstrate your professionalism and confidentiality.

Close your story with the main point that you are trying to illustrate.

Helping others to see the intention and complexity of our daily practice is part of what supports our work as professionals.

Our strength is in embracing complexity over simplicity

How we present stories changes how others perceive us. Often, we stumble over our words and use catchphrases, thinking they are a strength, which harms our professional image and impacts the importance of our work and our professional visibility. 

We must take care in the words we use and the values we convey. By reflecting deeply on our intentions and practicing how to articulate why we make connections with children, we advance our professional voice and help break the assumptions about what it takes to care for and nurture children.

What phrases do you think impact our professional practices?

Applied knowledge is the act of learning through hands-on experiences. It is a concept that takes education from behind the desk and creates learning communities of practice. In communities of practice, individual and shared meaning moves beyond the school into the community and society. As a dynamic process, learning becomes ever-changing, responding to the dynamics of our community. An applied learning journey is a very different classroom experience than the test-driven, direct instruction models that most teachers must adopt through policy mandates.

Our ability to be citizens, actively engaged in our society advocating for continuous learning and improvement of our community develops from critical thinking skills. Our ability to make moral decisions that support the societal greater good forms from a profoundly personal and inherently social consciousness. 

Our greatest challenge in education lies in the development of critical thinking. When the standardization of education minimizes critical thinking, our concept of community begins to wear down and gets eroded by our ability to customize our experiences. Customization of experiences further undermines critical thinking as we weaken a muscle that never needs to negotiate counter-narratives to our beliefs.

Our ability to respect differences creates meaning and acknowledges the profoundly personal nature of each person's experiences. Social connection and openness to new ideas are foundations for lasting change/citizenship. When we see an issue as two opposites, we lose perspective, the opposite of critical thinking – it is the unexamined acceptance of a belief.

To increase our visibility, we must tell stories that reveal the complexity of early childhood education and the profound ways that children make meaning of their experiences..