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Urban Advocates for Young Children withSpecial Needs: First-Year Early ChildhoodTeachers Enacting Social JusticeVictoria I. Puig a & Susan L. Recchia ba Montclair State University , Montclair , New Jersey , USAb Teachers College, Columbia University , New York , New York , USAPublished online: 20 Jul 2012.

To cite this article: Victoria I. Puig & Susan L. Recchia (2012) Urban Advocates for Young Childrenwith Special Needs: First-Year Early Childhood Teachers Enacting Social Justice, The New Educator,8:3, 258-277, DOI: 10.1080/1547688X.2012.697018

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The New Educator, 8:258–277, 2012Copyright © CCNY and ATEISSN: 1547-688X print/1549-9243 onlineDOI: 10.1080/1547688X.2012.697018

Urban Advocates for Young Children withSpecial Needs: First-Year Early Childhood

Teachers Enacting Social Justice

VICTORIA I. PUIGMontclair State University, Montclair, New Jersey, USA

SUSAN L. RECCHIATeachers College, Columbia University, New York, New York, USA

This article shares the ways new early childhood teachers carryforward the social justice principles emphasized in their teachereducation program into their actual practice. Their participationin a university-sponsored mentoring group served as the contextfor this study. Through an emergent themes analysis, we exploredhow they prioritized diverse learners’ needs, learned to “work thesystem” to provide optimal special education services, struggledto make multicultural curriculum meaningful and realized theimportance of working with families. Our findings also illumi-nate the ways that feedback from new teachers can enhance earlychildhood teacher preparation.

Challenges to teaching in urban schools have been well documented in theliterature and statistics on the numbers of teachers who leave the professionwithin their first five years are highest in these settings (Smith & Smith, 2009).Preparing teachers to meet the needs of children with disabilities withindiverse urban early childhood classrooms is particularly complex (Richards,2010). General education teachers feel unprepared, and attrition and teachershortages in special education persist (Recchia & Puig, 2011). Increasingrates of childhood poverty and developmental delays in young childrenmake it more likely that early childhood teachers will be working in inclusiveclassrooms with varying degrees of support (Peterson et al., 2004), wherethey will be called upon to advocate for children.

Address correspondence to Victoria I. Puig, Montclair State University, 1 Normal Drive,University Hall 3235, Montclair, NJ 07043, USA. E-mail: puigv@mail.montclair.edu

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The very classrooms that need the most stability often receive theleast, creating a lack of continuity in teaching that results in children beingtaught primarily by novice teachers and few opportunities for buildingcohesive school communities and reaping the benefits they can provide(Ingersoll, 2001). Teacher education scholars link this phenomenon in part toteacher preparation (Darling-Hammond, 2006), articulating the importanceof preparing teachers to meet the needs of diverse populations and to betterunderstand the communities in which their students live (Gimbert, Desai, &Kerka, 2010).

Viewing teacher preparation and teaching through a social justice lens,Cochran-Smith and her colleagues have articulated the complexity involvedin taking this stance (Cochran-Smith, 2004; Cochran-Smith, Shakman, Terrell,Barnatt, & McQuillan, 2009). Preparation for social justice is not just aboutcreating curriculum but also about particular teaching practices and advo-cating for students. Although these authors have shown evidence that newteachers are able to bring the social justice agenda started in their prepara-tion programs into their classroom practice, other scholars have made clearthat this is not often an easy task, as many realities of urban school contextscan work against a social justice agenda (Agarwal, Epstein, Oppenheim,Oyler, & Sonu, 2010; Borrero, 2009). The ability to teach from a social jus-tice stance seems to require a developmental process. In order to focus onthe communities they serve (Gimbert et al., 2010), novice teachers ofteninitiate their efforts at the individual level before expanding to a broaderperspective. Cochran-Smith and her colleagues (2009) reported:

beginning teachers talked about and enacted a commitment to equity andsocial justice at the individual level, rather than at the policy or broaderpolitical level. . . . [W]e see this bedrock commitment to individual’slearning as the beginning of teaching for social justice rather than theendpoint. We think it may function as a bridge for beginning teachersto larger critiques and activism that examine the conditions that createinequity in schools. (pp. 372–373)

Enacting social justice is a developmental process for children as well asfor teachers. Several researchers have discussed the importance of setting thestage for social justice education in early childhood (Araujo & Strasser, 2003;Grennon Brooks & Thompson, 2005). It is at this critical time that youngchildren are beginning the process of making sense of the world aroundthem and their place within it (Grennon Brooks & Thompson, 2005). Theyobserve everyday actions, attitudes, and responses of the people in theirlives and interpret messages about topics including power, responsibility,and racial and gender identity (Araujo & Strasser, 2003). Teachers workingwith young children are constantly being faced with a difficult set of choices.They can either “snap a lid on” (Polite & Baird Saenger, 2003, p. 277) or

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ignore “dangerous” or “forbidden” topics, thus creating fertile ground formisconceptions, pre-prejudice, and fear, or they can break the silence to“help students acquire the knowledge, attitudes, and skills they will need toparticipate in civic action to make society more equitable and just” (Banks,1991, as cited in Araujo & Strasser, 2003, p. 180).

A social justice agenda, particularly one aimed at young children,would not be complete without a commitment to partnering with families.Legislation and research alike support families’ roles and responsibilities aspartners with professionals (Turnbull, Turnbull, Erwin, Soodak, & Shogren,2011). Collaboration between families of children with special needs and theprofessionals serving them is addressed specifically in the 2004 amendmentsto the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) that state:

[A]lmost 30 years of research and experience has demonstrated that theeducation of children with disabilities can be made more effective by . . .strengthening the role and responsibilities of parents and ensuring thatfamilies (of children with disabilities) have meaningful opportunitiesto participate in the education of their children at school and home.(20 U.S.C. Sec. 1401 (c)(5)(B))

Inclusive education and ensuring that all children’s needs are met inleast restrictive environments is a core social justice issue. Diverse settingsand service options increase families’ needs for support to make informedchoices. Affirming families’ strengths and values and recognizing them as theprimary decision makers for their children, while simultaneously researchingand sharing all possible options with them openly and with neutrality, canbe particularly challenging for new teachers (Murray et al., 2007). Teachers’strong investments in their work and their passionate interest in the field canmake their interactions with families difficult (Puig & Recchia, 2008).

Moving to a family empowerment model (Bailey, 2001) that acknowl-edges whole families as resources is particularly critical for families newto the special education system and during times of educational transition.The process of mining and valuing the resources found in families can beconsidered a sacred alchemy (Puig, 2010). By taking stock of the larger inter-personal situations within families (Recchia & Williams, 2006), “professionalscan recognize the precious potential of the everyday elements of families’lives and how they can be mined and combined” (Puig, in press) to con-tribute to responsive social justice approaches. Teacher education programscan set the stage for the implementation of a social justice agenda. In a studythat examined how families’ cultural and linguistic resources are integratedinto Early Intervention services, Puig pointed out that:

Teacher education programs are in a unique position to offer pre-service and in-service teachers foundations in child development, second

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language acquisition, understandings of causes and responses to disabil-ity, and collaboration with colleagues and families that consider nuancedunderstandings of cultural values, beliefs and influences. Introducingthese topics and strategies in pre-service teachers’ coursework in cohe-sive, integrated ways can lay strong foundations at a time when thesenew educators are forming their own identities within their professionalcultures. (Puig, in press)

This article shares insights regarding dually certified early childhoodgraduates’ abilities to carry forward the social justice principles emphasizedin their teacher education program into their actual practice as new teachers.Their participation in a university-sponsored support group for new teachers(The Early Childhood Professional Mentoring Group [ECPMG]) provided acontext for sharing with and learning from their peers, while simultaneouslyallowing their former instructors to gain fresh insight from the field that couldimprove the effectiveness of the teacher preparation program. We reflecthere our analysis of one particularly meaningful meeting that sheds lighton the following research questions: What professional challenges related toenacting social justice do participants identify during group discussion? Howdo participants begin to prioritize and strategize to address these emergingchallenges?

METHODS

Preparation Program

Our teacher education program seeks to prepare teachers within three pri-mary philosophical stances: inquiry, curriculum making, and social justice.Students are supported to continually observe and to reflect on their workwith young children, raising questions for themselves and others, to dif-ferentiate instruction to meet the needs of diverse learners within theirclassrooms rather than relying only on a standard curriculum, and to advo-cate for equity and children’s rights within educational settings. Situated ina large, urban, metropolitan area fully immersed in educational challenges,the program emphasizes the importance of teachers’ impact on children’slives through the enactment of these stances and assesses the ways that theyare incorporated by students within their practicum experiences.

During the course of the program, students seeking dual certificationin Early Childhood and Special Education take part in multiple practica,each of which is paired with a weekly seminar led by their field supervisor.The seminars provide a forum for sharing ideas and creating a sense ofcommunity among student teachers. Graduates who chose to participate inthe ECPMG were provided continuity of experience, as the group extended

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the supportive context that had been established in their student-teachingseminars. We co-led this monthly support group where informal discussionallowed new teachers to think together about their day-to-day classroompractice.

Research Context

The ECPMG brought new teachers together to share their triumphs andchallenges as they began to navigate their first years teaching and to sharein group problem solving around specific field-based dilemmas. Meetingswere open to all recent graduates and were attended regularly by some andsporadically by others. The content for each meeting arose from the newteachers’ experiences and emerging needs and interests. Each session wastape recorded and later transcribed as part of a larger study exploring theimpact of the early childhood teacher preparation program on its graduates.

This article reflects one especially relevant meeting attended by two par-ticipants who not only illuminated a particular set of challenges to addressingsocial justice issues in early childhood settings but also demonstrated theirown emerging sense of themselves as teacher advocates. We chose to ana-lyze this transcript separate from the others because of its specific focus onissues of social justice, an area of significant emphasis in the program and ofparticular interest to us as program instructors. The participants in this meet-ing represented different kinds of early childhood settings, yet the issuesthat arose at their sites were meaningful across a variety of contexts.

Participants

Genny and Amanda were both first-year teachers who had earned mas-ters degrees and dual certifications in early childhood and early childhoodspecial education. They had been students together in the program, and,although they were not close friends, they had taken classes togetherand shared program experiences. Both were women in their early tomid-twenties. Genny was teaching in a self-contained special educationkindergarten classroom within a larger general education setting, andAmanda was in an inclusive Head Start preschool classroom.

Data Analysis

ECPMG meetings were audio recorded and transcribed to be used as data toinform the program. Each researcher first conducted an independent reviewof the meeting transcript, using the research questions as a frame for identi-fication of preliminary emerging themes (Marshall & Rossman, 1999). Next,we came together to collaboratively synthesize our initial findings. Emergentthemes were discussed and compared, and we came to a consensus on

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those that best represented the data. Once all themes were agreed upon,representative and meaningful quotes were integrated to allow more directaccess to participants’ voices and experiences (Stake 2005; Wolcott, 1994).

Limitations

Our analysis is based on one discussion between two new teachers withina particular program and group context, and these findings may not applyto other teachers in other settings. However, we believe that the naturalcontext in which this discussion took place lends authenticity to its content.Our data give voice to these new teachers’ concerns and ideas in ways thatcan inform both teachers and teacher educators.

RESULTS

Prioritizing Meeting the Needs of Diverse Learners

Our analysis of the dialogue transcript yielded interesting information aboutthe many challenges our participants faced as new teachers attempting toimplement social justice agendas and working to be advocates for youngchildren with special needs. We were reminded of the range of learnersin all types of early childhood settings as Genny and Amanda describedthe ways that they tried to make accommodations for the diverse learn-ers in their classrooms. The experiences they shared echoed findings fromCochran-Smith and her colleagues (2009) in their individual approach to apedagogy of social justice. Although their settings were quite different (a self-contained kindergarten setting versus a Head Start Pre-K classroom), bothnew teachers found themselves in comparable situations regarding the needto negotiate and advocate on behalf of their students to make sure that theywere getting not only the support they needed but also that students wereable to access an appropriate curriculum in the least restrictive environment.Similar to the teachers studied by Lava, Recchia, and Giovacco-Johnson(2004), our participants were often positioned in their programs to take onthe role of “manager” or “organizer” for their students in order to make surethat they were getting the services and learning experiences they needed.

NEGOTIATION AND ADVOCACY

In Genny’s school there were possibilities for inclusive experiences, but inorder to put these opportunities into motion, many details needed to beconsidered. Genny shared an example of how she worked to set up theappropriate supports and to negotiate with her colleagues and principalto transition a child with autism from her classroom into the general

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education Pre-K, which she felt would better meet this child’s social anddevelopmental needs:

I figured out a way around the system. . . . Just go straight to the source,or else it has to go through ten layers of bureaucracy . . . getting a para,took two and a half months when it could have taken a day. I wentstraight to the Pre-K teacher, talked to her first, and then brought it upwith the principal who said, Oh, well, if the Kindergarten teacher alreadysaid it was okay—the Pre-K teacher said it was okay, then that’s fine. .. . It took a while for the teachers to get used to it. It requires almostthe entire staff to be involved. . . . she got really frustrated in my class-room and rather than behaving appropriately, she’s regressed a lot, sonow there’s a lot of pushing and there’s a lot of falling on the groundand crying. . . . And it is February, but we finally worked it out . . .we’re going to start transitioning her tomorrow into having first snack fortwenty minutes with the Pre-K fours, and then hopefully later she can doplaytime with them, and then hopefully later maybe she can do morningreading with them, and we’re going to see how much she can go intotheir classroom. . . . she regressed so much in the last, several monthsthat we’re just thinking this is probably the best thing for her right now.

Genny shared the ways that she differentiated instruction for childrenat her site, making sure that those children who were ready for a morechallenging curriculum were getting it, even if they were not able to be inan inclusive classroom. She described her strategy for preparing one childfor more inclusive experiences:

Hopefully, he’ll start with math inclusion . . . we’re really hoping thathe’ll get to go to general ed in a couple of years ‘cause he’s not veryfar behind. His math is actually ahead because I privately tutored him inmath. I do one-on-one with him, and he’s almost at grade two math inthe first grade. So hopefully next year, he can do grade two math. . . .And then hopefully, one day he can do science and social studies . . .but at my site right now, not so much inclusion.

Genny’s commitment to prioritizing meeting the diverse learning needs ofher students was evident in her willingness to think outside the box and totake action to advocate for programmatic changes.

In her setting, Amanda encountered obstacles to getting children theservices they needed. Working with other specialists to make sure that chil-dren were evaluated in a timely way was a challenge, as she described inour meeting:

Going through the channels is so frustrating. I’ve been trying to getoccupational therapy for one of my kids, and it’s been taking months to

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just even get the eval done—and he so needs it. Talk about regression,this kid is getting worse and worse every day.

For both of these first-year teachers, advocating for their students becamean important social justice component of their work, particularly with regardto negotiating for children with special needs.

COMPLEXITIES OF INCLUSION

Both Genny and Amanda expressed the ways that they often felt over-whelmed by the complexities they had to deal with in addressing the needsof many of their students. Despite their commitment to responding to diverselearners and their willingness to negotiate and advocate for them, there weremany policy and placement issues that made their work more challenging.Genny’s special education classroom was housed within a general educationschool, which might seem like a perfect environment for fostering inclusion,but the conditions of the general education program were not always con-ducive to successfully making this happen, as she described in the examplebelow:

We have one child who should be getting inclusion. He’s definitely athis . . . grade level for most of the subjects. But he’s not getting it becausethe first grade, which is where he should be, has a class of twenty-nine kids. And it’s too big for him, he’s used to six kids with threeteachers . . . . And it’s a Catholic school, it’s very structured—the teacheris really strict . . . and it’s very different from the environment that he’sin, so we’re worried about throwing him in there.

In Amanda’s setting, there were complications for children with specialneeds who needed full-day care, as the Head Start program offered onlythree hours of class per day. She described the complications faced by onefamily whose child with special needs was asked to leave his extended caresetting:

[H]e was out for two weeks because he got kicked out of his day care . . .cause he’s only in the three-hour program and then both parents work,so he goes to another day care for another six hours . . . [and] theyasked him to leave because they said he needed a smaller setting thanhe was in.

Both Genny and Amanda found the logistics involved in providing the ser-vices that children need to successfully navigate their school environmentscould be daunting, frustrating, and extremely time-consuming to negotiate.

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Uncovering Complex Challenges to Providing Optimal Services

As described in the literature, working in urban classrooms presents aunique set of challenges for new early childhood teachers that they are notoften prepared for in their teacher education programs (Lava, Recchia, &Giovacco-Johnson, 2004). Issues of inadequate space, uncomfortable class-room conditions, and a lack of administrative support create situationsthat require teachers to become flexible and creative thinkers in advocat-ing for their students. Genny and Amanda shared stories from their sitesthat illustrated the ways in which they confronted these challenges as newteachers.

PHYSICAL ENVIRONMENT

Both of the participating teachers described obstacles in their physical work-ing environments. At Amanda’s site, there was no space outside of theclassroom for the children to engage in group activities, as she describesbelow:

So our school has no multi-purpose space, which kind of hampers [groupactivities] because everything is in the hallway. [laughs] So you put allthe kids sitting on mats and then there’s two rows of chairs that go downthe hallway and that’s really where the audience sits.

In Genny’s classroom, there were problems with rodents. She describedboth creative storage solutions and creative thinking in explaining the eventsto the children:

We have lots of rodents. . . . We had a . . . rodent that ate our bookcalled “The Case of the Fuzzy Thing”. . . . And it was very clearly bitten,chewed off the corners, you could still see the teeth marks. . . . myassistant teacher is very used to them so she knows exactly what todo . . . She says, “No, they’ll climb this.” And she puts everything, anypackages we have into the microwave. . . . we had put our Christmascandy into a drawer that’s a plastic one, and they gnawed through theback . . . got the chocolate, ate two pieces. . . . They love chocolate.And you know what was sad? It was an Advent calendar. [laughs] And sothe kids were missing two pieces and we didn’t want to tell them that itwas the mice that ate it, so we said, “Oh maybe, somebody was hungryand came in and had some chocolate, so it was nice that we shared withthem.” [laughs] Because we didn’t want them to go home and tell theirparents that we had mice in the classroom.

The teachers seemed able to overcome these obstacles and to find ways tocontinue to provide meaningful programs for their students.

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SUPERVISION, COLLABORATION, AND SUPPORT

Genny and Amanda both shared concerns about collaboration at their sites.In Genny’s school, the issues seemed to center around collaboration withother specialists. She described the way that a group of therapists assignedto particular children in her classroom were not always providing the levelof service that the children should be receiving as follows:

I have therapists that are scared of some of my kids, and they do push-inwhen they really shouldn’t. . . . I was a first-year teacher, I don’t know alot of the therapists, the way they get funded and stuff like that. I had atone point three therapists doing half an hour lessons, and they were alltaking credits for all the kids. . . . I was talking to my supervisor a monthand a half later, and she said “What?! What’s going on?” . . . I had a fewstudents that they weren’t seeing, I looked at their IEPs [IndividualizedEducational Programs] finally . . . and said, “Oh, this kid is supposed tobe getting three times a week” . . . but I only see the therapists comingonce a week to pick up this one random child once in a while, and itwould always be the good kids that never had any problems. . . . thenmy supervisor realized that they were doing that, and I didn’t know that’snot okay to do that. . . . my kids haven’t been getting their therapies fora long time, actually just started getting their therapies in the last threeweeks the way they’re supposed to.

Amanda talked about the lack of collaboration among the teachers ather school and the ways she felt it was discouraged by her supervisor:

I mean, we’re not really an open-door kind of school. Every teacherkeeps to themselves and there’s not a lot of collaboration, and we wereactually told not to collaborate [laughs] which I thought was kind offunny. . . . At the last staff meeting, it came up that teachers were social-izing too much, so if you’re on your lunch break, you shouldn’t beinside another person’s classroom. . . . [T]he staff meetings that we haveare basically, you know, the director gives the news and then it’s, “Anyquestions? No? Okay, here’s your payroll.”

Both teachers described supervisors at their sites who were less responsiveand available than they would have liked. As Genny stated, “she’s a greatsupervisor but she’s so busy and overwhelmed that it takes her a while tonotice that these therapists weren’t doing what they were supposed to bedoing.”

LOGISTICS AND LEARNING ON THE JOB

Genny and Amanda described the ways that they were figuring out howto work within the systems of their school programs. There were recurring

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issues at both sites that the teachers began to recognize as problems thatthey were not willing to ignore. Although it was difficult at times to knowwhat to do and who to go to for help, they were beginning to find moreeffective ways to negotiate the logistical issues at their sites. Genny finallyfigured out that the therapists needed to work differently with her studentsand found a way to make that happen. Amanda, though still somewhat timidabout confronting the therapists directly, was clearly recognizing problemsas they arose and beginning to seek solutions.

For both teachers, working to meet the diverse needs of their studentswith special needs was an ongoing challenge that they faced one child ata time. In Amanda’s setting, the complexities around negotiating servicesfor children were particularly troubling at times. She shared the dilemmasfaced by her program regarding the restrictive ways in which spaces forchildren with and without designated special needs were slotted. She felt thisadministrative policy interfered with authentic assessments of the children’sneeds at times. In describing an interaction with her supervisor she shared:

[S]he mentioned to me in the beginning of the year [that] I had to write aprogress report, and I said that a child was cognitively at age level, andshe said “Just give him a twenty-five percent delay. . . . Cause otherwisehe’s not going to get services”— But he’s not delayed.

In another situation, Amanda was able to work closely with her assistantteacher to address a dilemma regarding a child who was not receiving thecounseling services he was scheduled to receive. She shared:

I guess as the teacher, if you’re advocating for your kids, you’re goingto be the one that has to tell somebody who can do something. But . . .I wouldn’t feel comfortable going directly to them and telling them you’renot doing your job. . . . So because I have my tail between my legs,my assistant teacher actually went, she was the one—she’s been work-ing there for seventeen years—she was the one that went and told oursupervisor ‘cause it irritated her. . . . Finally, she said, “I’m just goingto tell them now.” Versus, my “I don’t know what I should do” andblah-blah-blah-blah.

Creating Meaningful Multicultural Curriculum and Experiences

Genny and Amanda discussed their attempts to create social justice learn-ing experiences that were responsive to their students’ ages, interests, andlively curiosities. Issues of race and cultural expressions and identities wereaddressed using books, bulletin boards, classroom visitors, and plenty ofopen and spontaneous discussion.

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BLACK HISTORY MONTH AND OTHER DILEMMAS

As in many early childhood classrooms, the issue of if and how to addressholidays was questioned. Amanda expressed a thoughtful awareness of theimportance of this topic and she also recognized the pivotal role she mayhave in contributing to or detracting from her students’ development of whatDerman-Sparks refers to as “pre-prejudice”:

It’s been challenging for me to try to figure out how to do it and it’s notlike I’ve been told, you have to do it a certain way, but I want to do itin the best way I can for these kids without really creating any kind ofnegative, I don’t know, stereotypes and things like that. (1989, p. 3)

She described an alternative her school has created for one traditionalholiday:

Instead of Halloween, ‘cause there are religious issues aroundHalloween, now we have a “Character Day” in the fall, which is basi-cally each class takes a book and then the children kind of act it out.So that was kind of fun. We did Duck in a Truck, it’s this rhyming book.

Amanda also carefully considered the relevance of “Black HistoryMonth,” a mandated element of her school’s curriculum, for her students:

We have a thematic curriculum, and in February, I’m supposed to bedoing Black history. What a challenge it is for me to wrap my armsaround how to do it in a way that I think is meaningful for the kids! Idon’t really feel comfortable imposing a race issue on them, especiallybeing so young. And I find it interesting that, my population is predom-inantly Black, but it’s not totally, I have a child from Ecuador, I have achild who’s of Indian descent, I have another child who’s I think PuertoRican, but there’s no Hispanic history month—so I feel for those chil-dren, you know, they’re going to be kind of confused as to why do weonly study Black history?

It seems that in terms of this required curricular element some of herconcerns and efforts had adults rather than children as their focus:

I do have a lot of leeway, but I’m not sure how it’s going to be perceivedfrom the outside, and then from the other teachers and from my ownassistants. . . . [T]he tact I’ve been taking, is to treat it as more of amulticultural thing, but I don’t want it to seem like I’m neglecting theBlack history thing because if you look at our bulletin board, it’s allabout, you know, quotes from Maya Angelou and just famous BlackAmericans, and there’s a lot of Black pride things.

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Amanda worked to find ways to make it meaningful for her students:

[S]o I’ve been kind of just going at it from a “we have similarities anddifferences, and some of us have light skin, some of us have dark skin,”and learning about influential people that might have meaning for them.

WAFFLES, CHOCOLATE, AND OTHER DISCUSSIONS OF RACE

Genny also recognized that her kindergarteners were well on the way toconstructing their racial identities (Araujo & Strasser, 2003). She honoredtheir curiosities and, as Grennon Brooks and Thompson (2005) describe,she used diverse books and found active ways to “involve students in queststo make sense of their world” (p. 48) and to create and share their “raciallanguage” (Strasser, 1999). As Genny broke the silence sometimes associatedwith race she granted permission (Polite & Baird Saenger, 2003) for herstudents to construct new understandings of the world around them.

The anecdote below demonstrates how, as the community of curiosityrather than “community of silence” (Polite & Baird Saenger, 2003, p. 274) thatwas created in Genny’s classroom reached out to visitors, opportunities toidentify and address students’ understandings and misunderstandings wererevealed:

We read The Colors of Us . . . and we did a project with our art teacherwhere we mixed our skin tone using the multicultural [paints] and wenamed our own colors. . . . It’s interesting because some of my kids willsay things and then taken out of context when we have visitors, it soundstotally strange to them because my kids will be “Oh, hmm! I’m chocolatebut I think you’re a dark chocolate!” And the kids are definitely noticingand they don’t call somebody Black and this person’s White. They’relike, “yes, you look like maybe you’re a waffle.” And they have all thesedescriptive words.

Another example emerged when Genny brought her own culture into theclassroom to contribute to the “quest”:

We did Chinese New Year and the kids were like, “Oh, you’re Chinese.”And I talked about how I’m Taiwanese . . . some of them got it, some ofthem didn’t.

Genny and Amanda discussed another example of how a multiculturallesson could go in an unexpected direction:

Genny: And they’ve picked up playing dreidel. I taught them fromHanukkah.

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Amanda: They’re addicted, right? She said they’re gambling in the backof the classroom.

Genny: They sit in this table in the back, all five of them, and they justroll—“You got a Nun! No, you cheated!” And so they werefighting over that. And like, “No, I got a Gimmel, you can’tdouble-spin!”

Partnering with Families

Just as multicultural education had been integrated in Amanda and Genny’scoursework, creating partnerships with families had also been a topicemphasized in their graduate study. But as these new teachers got to knowtheir own students and their students’ families, they seemed to place newimportance and negotiated meanings on the value of open and trustingrelationships between themselves, their students’ families, and other serviceproviders (Zhang, Schwartz, & Lee, 2006). They recognized the value ofthese collaborations in achieving social justice ideals.

PLACEMENT DECISIONS

Genny and Amanda shared the ways they work to support family choice indecision making (Murray et al., 2007). Here, Genny discussed some of thefactors that she and one kindergarten student’s family thought about as theyconsidered an appropriate setting for the student:

This child’s mom wants her to be in a school that’s social and that’s whyshe’s in my school and not in an ABA [Applied Behavior Analysis] schoolwhen she’s autistic, because she does have social skills, but they’re notat a level of a six-year-old or a five-year-old. . . . She’s come a long way,so we’re hoping that she’ll be at least academic-ready for next year . . .or else the parents are also looking at different settings for her.

Genny also discussed how she worked closely with another family tounderstand and respond to her student’s struggles. Communication with thefamily, a willingness to consider programming in a flexible and responsivemanner, and an awareness of available support services helped dry thiskindergartner’s tears:

Her mom said that she had already started to regress in the summerdue to the holiday, due to the vacation, and then there was also thetransition of her mom being pregnant and having a baby. And then theywent to Honduras in September right after school started. She regressedeven more. And then being in a new school and everything, she justbasically broke down to how she was when she was three years old,and the behaviors that they hadn’t seen since she was three years old,

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they all resurfaced. And so just for the last . . . four or five months, we’vebeen trying to get her back to where she was. . . . She cried for twomonths straight! We had to half-day the program for her, so she goes toschool from eight to twelve instead of eight to three. And then everythingwas put to the easiest thing that she could do and just try to establishconfidence in her. And now, for the last two weeks! Finally, she hasn’tcried. Yaaaay! . . . But it’s not been me. We hired her para, a one-on-onepara, because she came to school without one.

PROBLEM SOLVING AND SUPPORT SERVICES

Amanda also reached out to colleagues and shared how additional supportservices helped her students and their families deal with difficult issues:

I have a child who’s had cancer since he was two months old . . . andnow they say that his cancer is stable, so the mother wanted him to getinto a school setting for the first time. He has obviously some social-emotional issues just from not being in a school setting and dealing withhis illness, and so he receives counseling. . . . I talked to the motherabout . . . getting counseling for [herself] and how to deal with him‘cause I know it’s been hard for [her].

But then I had another child who was getting counseling . . . turned outthe reason this kid was getting counseling is ‘cause both parents were inthe military and were bouncing back and forth from Iraq.

Genny and Amanda talked together about the ways they tried to work withfamilies to support cohesive approaches to supporting children’s positivebehaviors and interactions at home and school:

Amanda: She’s admitted that they had no discipline for a long timebecause he was so sick, and we’ve been implementing a dis-cipline plan for the past year, but I think she definitely needsmore help. And so she attended the discipline workshop atthe special ed school that I’m affiliated with . . .

Genny: I really think that if . . . this mom [of a child in her classroom]had a better behavioral plan instigated at home, it would reallyhelp them. The reason I think this is because she came intomy classroom for a visit . . . and then when she was aboutto leave, the child put up . . . a real big show and huggedhis mom, and said “Please don’t leave! So she slipped a dollarinto his pocket!”

These new teachers looked at their students’ lives both inside and out-side of their classrooms when considering how to support them and their

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families. They recognized methods of assessment, educational placements,appropriate support services, differentiated instruction, and administra-tive policies as social justice issues. To address complex and diversechallenges including placement decisions, skill regression, new siblings, mil-itary deployments, cancer, and crying, they collaborated with families andreached out to other professionals.

DISCUSSION/IMPLICATIONS

Through their shared discussion of day-to-day classroom practice, Gennyand Amanda demonstrated how they continued to draw on the reflec-tive process that was such an integral part of their preparation programto construct their expectations about teaching and learning as they tran-sitioned from students to teachers. They shared with us the small thingsthat they did every day that reflected their priorities as they learned to“work the system” on behalf of the children in their classrooms, struggled tomake multicultural curriculum meaningful for early childhood students, andrealized the importance of working with families.

Advocacy as a Developing Process

According to Cochran-Smith et al. (2009), developing social justice skills isa process. Most prior studies look at teacher attitudes and beliefs ratherthan their actual practices, providing little evidence of what teaching forsocial justice actually looks like in the classroom. Cochran-Smith and hercolleagues found that teaching for social justice in their participating newteachers started at the individual level, focusing on meeting the needs ofparticular students. This finding is certainly echoed in our results. Gennyand Amanda entered their first year of teaching with an eye toward givingchildren what they need and found many ways to advocate for the childrenin their classrooms. Although initially motivated from this standpoint, as theyengaged in the everyday processes of advocating for individual children,they began to gain a deeper understanding of the larger policy implicationsembedded in the daily challenges of responsive teaching. Their discussion ofthe issues at their schools clearly reflected the kind of social justice thinkingthat Cochran-Smith and colleagues talks about, which goes beyond teachingstrategies to “how they think about their work and interpret what is goingon in schools and classrooms” (p. 350).

THE IMPORTANCE OF SUPPORT

As first-year teachers, Genny and Amanda bring enthusiasm and commit-ment to their work with diverse early childhood students. Being recent

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graduates of a program that emphasized teaching for social justice seemsto have helped to fuel their passion in this arena. The real challenges thatthey face in their urban classrooms, however, can be daunting at times, asstated by Agarwal and colleagues: “Once preservice teachers leave theiruniversity programs and enter their own classrooms, their commitmentssometimes collide with the realities of being novice teachers in a harrow-ing and unforgiving school system” (2010, p. 239). Although great value isseen in developing students’ visions of social justice early in their careers,more than vision is needed to enact it in their classroom and school practice.As Borrero aptly states:

[S]ocial justice for new teachers combines effective classroom practicewith a vision for equity and community participation. The key is for newteachers to have access to this combination—not only through curricu-lum in their teacher education program, but through a community ofother new teachers dedicated to social justice. (p. 222)

The ECPMG offered one such community to Genny and Amanda.Communities of practice such as this one can serve an important role, pro-viding continued support to new teachers who are still developing theirsense of themselves as advocates for children. ECPMG participants came torecognize the group as a safe space where they could access nonjudgmen-tal understanding and support from peers who were not only experiencingsimilar challenges in the field but were approaching them from a sharedfoundation. These new teachers and their mentors re-created a communityof support and inquiry that had its roots in their teacher preparation programand now extended to their work in the field.

Genny and Amanda share their stories and struggles with ease andopenness. Returning to the home of their teacher preparation where theywere initially nurtured as professionals gave them the freedom to “pick upthe conversation” with like-minded peers and mentors. Through these unfil-tered conversations in a safe space, they grappled with social justice issuesand their roles as advocates for children and families.

NEW TEACHERS AS A RESOURCE FOR TEACHER EDUCATION

Genny and Amanda and the ECPMG also present a rich resource to theteacher education program they return to. These new teachers have firsthandand up-close access to the sometimes “harrowing and unforgiving schoolsystem” that Agarwal and colleagues (2010) reference. Just as teachers mustbe “focused on the communities they serve” (Gimbert et al., 2010, p. 36),teacher educators must understand these communities and the challengesand opportunities they will afford their graduates as emergent teachers.

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Through the ECPMG, Genny and Amanda brought their classroom commu-nities to life in ways that could contribute to the development of the teachereducation program that they attended. Their experiences provided a realityframework that can inform the teacher education curriculum that Borrero(2009) identifies as a key component to social justice for new teachers. Whileensuring that all children’s needs are met in appropriate learning environ-ments is a social justice issue for young children, ensuring that all teachersare prepared to enter these environments ready to identify and address theirstudents’ educational needs may also be considered a social justice issue forpreservice teachers. Early childhood teacher educators are uniquely posi-tioned not only to give new teachers access to educational theories and bestpractices but also to provide them with a vision for taking action in theirclassrooms as advocates for children. Genny and Amanda’s willingness toshare their real-life experiences and struggles as first-year teachers allowedus to see anew those everyday dilemmas that our graduates will encounteras they transition to their new roles as early childhood educators. Our for-mer students are also uniquely positioned to provide meaningful feedbackthat will help us reshape the program that they remember so well. Theyhave the ability to reflect on their program experiences within the contextof their new identities. This situates them to help us recognize and articulatemore relevant connections between preparation and practice.

Listening to Genny and Amanda, we were reminded of our own roles asadvocates; their classroom experiences made their way back to our program.We were inspired to enhance our curriculum to make it more responsive tothe social justice issues that new teachers encounter. Their immediate andall too real examples from the field pushed us to find new ways to helpstudents better translate theories and ideals into realistic actions that theycan apply in their classrooms. In this way, our graduates contributed to thefield by enriching the preparation of their future colleagues.

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