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Susan Bernheimer offers teacher educators an important call to action with this significant book. Not only are the student stories compelling, but the idea of using these stories to reshape our emphasis is something we must take very seriously. In the tradition of Myles Horton and Paulo Freire, Bernheimer reminds us that teachers are learners and learners are teachers. Even though I have taught early childhood students for over twenty years, this book brought me a new perspective and a challenge I plan to take up. I encourage all who care about cultivating new leadership and expanding the voices and perspectives in the early childhood field to make this book a focus of serious consideration.
Margie Carter, Adjunct Faculty,
Pacific Oaks College and Shoreline Community College, Seattle, WA.
Author, Training Teachers: A Harvest of Theory and Practice.
I spent years discovering what Bernheimer has written about with grace
and passion in her well-crafted book. She will shake up some people, but
this book will find an important place in the efforts to improve higher
education for nontraditional students. Bernheimer knows how to grab the
reader. She sets a scene with such skill that I felt myself walking up
littered stairways in awe of a world I don’t live in. My heart pounded
as I stood on her battleground as she prepared to teach early childhood
education to people whose backgrounds differed so vastly from hers. This
is a book people will want to read, not just for its valuable information,
but also for the experience of hearing stories not often told. Bernheimer
has a big heart and strong guts, which she proves by sharing the insights
she gained on her own journey while traveling with her students on theirs.
This book is about truths—bloody, painful truths—multiple truths! It’s
also about teaching and learning. It will have a special place on my bookshelf.
Janet Gonzalez-Mena
Author, Multicultural Issues in Child Care
Susan
Bernheimer’s stories from nontraditional college students remind us of
the power of the human spirit—and the power of storytelling in human learning.
Adult education that builds on learners’ own life experience can help
all members of a class to understand human development theory, not just
as textbook knowledge but as it illuminates the diversity of real life
of adults and children.
Elizabeth Jones, PhD
Faculty, Human Development
Pacific Oaks College
Author, Teaching Adults: An Active Learning Process
Classrooms
are sites of struggle where narratives collide and subjectivities are
made and re-made in the image of both the limitations and possibilities
for transformation. Susan Bernheimer’s book visits the charged arena
of the college classroom where she encounters the moving testimonials
of nontraditional students. She engages their stories and their lives
with sensitivity and insight. This important new volume documents a journey
of hope and pedagogy of possibility.
Peter McLaren
Professor of Education,
U.C.L.A Graduate School of Education and Information Studies
Author, Che Guevara, Paulo Freire, and the Pedagogy of Revolution
In New Possibilities for Early Childhood Education, Susan Bernheimer shares
a creative, insightful way to present early childhood education to a class
of nontraditional students from poverty backgrounds. She successfully
blends student interviews and vignettes into the more standard instructional
material and involves students in active participation. It may be a small
book in the number of pages, but it is big in its rich, colorful content.
Bernheimer challenges us to revisit our teaching practices and invites
us to test the use of the life stories of our students to enrich our curriculum.
Docia Zavitkovsky
Past Present, National Association for the Education of Young Children
Author, Listen to the Children
The women who do the lion’s share of child care in this country
are poor women whose own childhoods were often cut short by the demands
of poverty and other hardships. Yet these women enter college for their
early childhood preparation programs and hear the formulas for “normal”
development and preferred child rearing patterns of middle class white
America, a culture far removed from their own experience. Susan Bernheimer
and her participants treat this dilemma in a most compelling manner. Their
stories add significant insights into childhood and human development,
authentic perspectives not addressed in current theory. For example, the
role of suffering as significant in development is a theme that emerges
time and again for these women, a theme that developmental theory barely
touches. These and other insights can enrich our theories and practice
of early childhood, our curricula, and our preparation of early childhood
educators. Susan’s sensitive ear and her participants’ willingness
to share their stories provide us a new possibility for transforming early
childhood education to include childhoods that are disadvantaged as well
as those that are privileged. Once you begin to read these stories and
Bernheimer’s analyses, you will never again view early childhood
education in the same way.
Mary Poplin
Dean of the School of Education
Claremont Graduate University
New Possibilities For Early Childhood Education: Stories From Our Nontraditional
Students is a valuable tool in the work of creating effective, equitable
adult learning environments. By providing the opportunity for her adult
students to give voice to their life stories and by weaving these stories
into early childhood education courses, the author truly honored her students’
identities, experiences and knowledge. She gives us the opportunity to
extend our horizons and knowledge. By recognizing the impact of gender,
class and culture in the lives of adult learners, the author also takes
us to the universal core of education that liberates and deepens all of
our humanity. I urge all adult educators to make New Possibilities
For Early Childhood Education: Stories From Our Nontraditional Students
part of their working library.
Louise Derman-Sparks
Faculty, Human Development, Pacific Oaks College
Co-Director, Early Childhood Equity Alliance
Author, Anti Bias Curriculum: Tools for Empowering Young Children