Janice Kroeger

A Bakhtinian Analysis of Particular Home-School Relations

In this article, we explore home-school relations as the establishment of a complex relationship between institutions and individuals in specific contexts. Using Bakhtin’s ideas of answerability, which depict a particular kind of responsibility, and addressivity, a conception of the relational nature of being, we explore how parents in one elementary school came to understand and enact relationships with schoolpeople. Answerability and addressivity have located within them ideas of power (What is the ethical response in the development of a child?) and voice (Who gets heard in the discourse of the school?). These concepts provide a framing of relationships that shows us how responsibility is mapped in inquiry on home-school relations. We analyze data from interviews with the parents of kindergarten and first grade children at the beginning and end of an academic year to illustrate enactments of answerability and addressivity through discussions of expectations for their child, themselves, and their child’s teacher.

Laboratory Schools as Places of Inquiry: A Collaborative Journey for Two Laboratory Schools.

Research Findings: Although there have been organizations that have supported cross-university collaboration (e.g., the National Organization of Child Development Laboratory Schools and the National Coalition of Campus Child Care), most laboratory schools have not engaged in sustained cross-program collaboration in order to advance their missions. This narrative describes an innovative and sustained collaborative journey of 2 university laboratory schools that share similar program philosophies and a common value for teacher research with children and preservice teachers. These 2 groups of faculty have developed a unique cross-university collaborative inquiry. Practice or Policy: The authors share highlights of their journey and their insights regarding the positive outcomes of their collaboration, including building a community of practice, articulating their practices, becoming a collective catalyst for change, and providing opportunities for professional development to occur on a daily basis within the context of their work with children. Challenges such as distance, time, cost, and the difficulty of sustaining ideas and relationships are also shared. These minor challenges were outweighed by the participants’ sense of joy in sharing perspectives and engaging in continuing dialogue that created lasting, genuine relationships and reenergized their view of the mission of laboratory schools as catalysts for change both for the laboratory faculty as well as for professionals in their communities.

‘They get enough of play at home’: a Bakhtinian interpretation of the dialogic space of public school preschool

ABSTRACT This dialogic analysis, on the professional identities of five public preschool teachers from a major metropolitan school district in the United States, examines the dialogic space of participants in a context where discourses of play-based pedagogies and academic readiness were in competition. In discussing the pedagogical tensions that ensued for these preschool teachers, we explore how each engaged in dialogue with official discourses that best aligned with their values and beliefs as informed by their personal histories. The findings, part of a larger narrative inquiry focused on life histories and teacher practice, demonstrate the importance of understanding the connection between personal histories, competing discourses within personal narratives and teaching practice as each relates to teachers’ construction of their professional identities and the role of play in their work.

Seeking justice through social action projects: Preparing teachers to be social actors in local and global problems:

In this article, we share a social action process useful in teacher education and derived from a decade of practical experience with social action projects. Influences, theoretical underpinnings, and individual leadership in an early childhood teacher education program are considered alongside practical enactments of social action projects by preservice teachers in their licensure program. One particular type of field-based assignment, the social action project, is described and analyzed. An examination of program transformations expanding the social justice framework to include more global perspectives, such as the International Baccalaureate Primary Years Program, shaped and challenged our earlier notions of working to address isms to frame justice and advocate for children in larger social and educational networks. We suggest what social action should and can entail in teacher education for an interdependent world and offer a gradient of social action for justice in early childhood education practices and environments.

Scribbling away the Ghosts: a Bakhtinian interpretation of preschool writers and the disruption of developmental discourses

Using Mikhail Bakhtins conceptions of dialogue, monologue, and chronotope, the authors ask readers to consider how different values and actions ultimately create the teaching and learning spaces in which children are recognized as literate. Using qualitative data that focus on the relational writing practices of two preschoolers, this ethnographic work explores how authoritative monologues of development and risk commonly structure our thinking about and interaction with young writers. The article offers an alternative interpretation of children as writers engaged within a relational and dialogic writing space, wherein dominant developmental beliefs are rejected and relationships between children and teachers are reinterpreted. The authors argue for the creation of dialogic classroom spaces that afford children opportunities for multiple possible futures as whole persons.