Subtitles section Play video Print subtitles ♪♪♪ ♪ Down came the rain and washed the spider out ♪ ♪ Out came the sun and dried up all the rain ♪ ♪ and the itsy bitsy spider crawled up the spout again ♪♪ That's your favorite song, again? Again? ♪ The itsy bitsy spider crawled up the water spout ♪ ♪ Down came the rain-- ♪♪ (Claire Knox) All of our competencies with regard to understanding child development and understanding dual language learners and understanding mental health issues for young children and understanding special needs, all of these competencies weave together into something that has a character in the early years of life that is different than the character that it has in later years. All gone. Oh, a little bit more actually. (Claire Knox) What's important about early childhood is that it's early childhood, that it is a time in life when children are laying down foundations that are gonna make a difference in terms of their relationships with the world around them, with how they learn, with how they think about things, with how they handle mistakes, with how they deal with things that don't work, with how they feel about working hard to accomplish things. That's what we're doing, and that's why it's important, and that's why it's special. The connection between studies of child development and what we're doing with young children in the early childhood setting is critical, and it provides an essential foundation for all the work that we do to prepare teachers of young children. So when you look at the areas of research that are most informative for our field, there have been incredible advances in terms of what we know about how children think and how they develop knowledge and how they construct knowledge. That has really influenced then how we theorize about the child as a learner and the adult as someone who supports that meaning-making child, so as we think about how do we prepare teachers to work with young children, we need a very strong foundation in knowing who the child is. You notice that we need something there. Will any of these things work? Yeah. (Mary Jane Maguire-Fong) One of the things that the study of child development provides us is that children are meaning-making creatures from the moment of birth. They arrive at birth gathering information from the world around them, organizing that information, constructing concepts about themselves, about others, about the object world. That process continues throughout early childhood. What we can be mindful of, those of us who are preparing teachers to work with young children, is how do we help teachers think about the image of the child as a learner and the image of a teacher who supports that child in learning, and what does it mean to teach and to learn when you're working with children from birth through 5 years of age? Here, would you like that? (Mary Jane Maguire-Fong) The organizing principles that I would hope that a teacher preparing to work with young children be offered include a very strong foundation in the image of the child as one who constructs understanding from everyday experiences. (Claire Knox) And so developmentally- apppropriate practice has to draw not only on what we know about developmental science and typical patterns and trends in terms of children's social-emotional development, their cognitive development, their development as whole people, but it also calls on us to really think about who's in front of us in terms of what we know about typical development-- Can I have that? I was using it first. (Claire Knox) But also the individual, the culture that person is in. Who is this person who's reacting this way? Later I can give you, but-- (Claire Knox) What we know about typical pattern and trend and what we know about how children learn and how their behavior changes is like a reference library. We use that as we're working with individual children, individual families, and individual contacts as a resource, but none of that answers the question of, what do I do in the classroom this afternoon? The circle was very, very sad, and Mommy asked him-- Baby, why are you crying? Because nobody want to play with me. Why you not ask the square? (Claire Knox) Because I can't answer that question until I also factor into what I'm thinking about the needs and interests of those children, the needs and interests of those families, the challenges that we're facing. What's going on in our community? The contacts that we're in, who's gonna be there in the classroom that day, what kind of caring community I'm trying to build, and what the skills and competencies of the children are in that process. Dump it out and try again? Angel. Angel? Yeah. Are you calling Angel? She's outside right now. Can you see her from there? Thinking about her? Up. Up? You're thinking about going up? We're gonna stay here for a little bit. Do you wanna read a story with us? There are lots of books here. You take a look outside. You say, "Hello." Early care and education is all about relationships to me. That's the way I define it, is that it's all about relationship building. Are you gonna go get it? What are you looking for? (Alice Nakahata) This goes back a lot to how important it is for children to feel emotionally secure so that then they have the freedom to explore, to learn, to be self-confident, and all that comes from the kind of nurturing and the kinds of interactions and relationships that they have had in that growing up period. You went around? You went around? (Mary Jane Maguire-Fong) Part of our image as a classroom is we've got a triangle of relationships. We've got children, teachers, and the families, and so how do we engage in dialogue alongside the families occasionally so that they, too, can inform our thinking about their children's ways of learning and thinking? I think that the children want to spend time with their families and their friends and their parents and their grandparents. Some of our children come from very extended families, so there's other people in the home, and I know that they are very important, and they, too, are a part of the child's development. So the family part, for a teacher to say to a parent, to a grandparent, to an auntie, "Here's what we do together." But in working with families what really came across is that is a context for each child. They are the primary caretakers of that child, and that child will learn values, will be able to do things within that context. I think one of the challenges in terms of getting students to be acquainted with the impact of families is for them to see the differences and also to be open to those differences and to be respectful of those differences and how much impact they have on the way that people raise young children. All that asphalt goes down, and the grater goes over, and what does it do? It flattens it out? (Mary Jane Maguire-Fong) California developed the foundations and the framework