Rooted in Belonging – Critical Place–Based Learning in Early Childhood and Elementary Teacher Education

Most practitioners and scholars agree that critical and reflective early childhood and elementary teachers are foundational for children’s holistic growth and development. Yet current policies focused on elevating testing and performativity are contributing to student and teacher anxiety and alienation. This book offers a counternarrative to neoliberal standardized preservice teacher development and assessment processes. The author examines how a cohort of teacher educators worked alongside their preservice teachers―both groups predominately White and female―to redesign their teacher education program. Sherfinski reveals how the narrative portfolio, an inquiry-based alternative to accreditation and standards-based assessments, was designed to locally document, resist, and disrupt the status quo. The narrative portfolio speaks back to standardized preservice teacher assessments by providing spaces for teacher candidates to demonstrate their knowledge of theory and practice as enacted in the natural settings of school and community. Rooted in Belonging shows why humanizing, democratic, place-based practices should be at the forefront of teacher education.

Book Features:

• Provides a rare portrait of equity-based teacher education at the confluence of place-based approaches, student diversity, and teacher education.
• Grapples with tough issues such as how the shared Whiteness of preservice teachers and children and their families play out alongside their differences.
• Explores how educators negotiate deep ideological differences while still preparing teachers for critical work.
• Examines how the current political climate around Black Lives Matters, the 2020 presidential election, and the COVID-19 pandemic contribute to the challenges of working in communities.
• Discusses how race, space, time, and settler colonialism shape the work of preservice teachers and their teacher educators.
• Shares action research and teacher leadership assignments, critical thinking and planning exercises, personal reflections, and preservice teachers’ narrative portfolio artifacts.

Melissa Sherfinski is an associate professor of early childhood and elementary education at West Virginia University. Sharon Hayes is an associate professor of elementary education at West Virginia University.