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In Living Stories: Nontraditional College Students in Early Childhood Education, Susan Bernheimer takes the reader into her journey with a group of nontraditional college students. Bernheimer's struggle to find a meaningful approach to teaching the students about early childhood development and care is infused with the insights and wisdom that come from listening to, and valuing, the remarkable stories of her students' lives. This book offers a powerful new road map for early childhood teacher preparation through a relational pedagogy that honors students' life experiences and that leads to deep reflection and learning. The approach is embedded in students' strengths and knowledge and is successfully inclusive of an increasingly diverse student demographic. Bernheimer provides an inclusive model of education that builds upon the strengths of all students.
List of contents
Acknowledgments - Foreword by Jacquelyn Green - Introduction - A World in Flux - Inside the Cultural Divide - Reflection on Life Stories - Gateway to New Realities - Vision of Hope - Journey Into Higher Education - Shifting Priorities for Classroom Teaching - Hear My Voice - Challenges of a Relational Pedagogy - Stepping Into the Future - Index.
About the author
Susan Bernheimer is an educator, researcher, and trainer on contemporary issues in early childhood education and formerly a member of the human development faculty at Pacific Oaks College in Pasadena, California, from 2001¿2015. She taught early childhood teacher preparation to impoverished college students for over ten years. Bernheimer received her doctorate from Claremont Graduate University. She is the author of New Possibilities for Early Childhood Education: Stories from Our Nontraditional Students (Peter Lang, 2003) and Voices of Early Childhood Educators (Peter Lang, 2016).
Summary
This book offers a powerful, new road map for early childhood teacher preparation through a relational pedagogy that honors students' life experience and that leads to deep reflection and learning.
Report
"With Living Stories, Susan Bernheimer has done it again. She has built on her 2003 book New Possibilities for Early Childhood Education to remind early childhood educators and practitioners that the world we live in has changed. It is no longer relevant or appropriate to expect to find education students in our classes who look like us, think like us, or share our worldview: they come from a very different and diverse world, and they are going to be our children's teachers and caregivers from now on. The children of the world need first and foremost to find themselves reflected in the voices of their teachers, in the modified or non-standard curriculum those teachers bring to the classroom, in the very different routines from those of the past: line up, be quiet, raise your hand. Now it is perhaps, let's go outside! Bernheimer's books and especially this one must be included as companions to 'the text' of all teacher education. Future teachers in North America will not be adequately prepared for the classrooms they will encounter unless they read and reflect on the scenarios that Bernheimer so beautifully describes." -Ailie Cleghorn, Graduate Program Director, Educational Studies, Department of Education, Concordia University (Montreal)
