Stories are powerful. They tell us who we are and who we can become. They locate us in human community and in the wide, wild world.

In the context of our lives as educators, the central questions about stories are: What stories do we want children to hear about themselves? What kind of storytellers do we want to be? What ideas and values do we want to call forward in our stories?

We are shaped by the stories we tell, as much as children are shaped by the stories we tell about them. Stories make us, all of us—the story tellers, and the people who the stories are about, and the people who hear the stories. The stories that we share speak volumes about who we want to be and the community that we want to nourish.

Listen to this insight about stories from the writer and essayist Brian Doyle:

Good stories are absolutely crucial to a good life and a good family and a good city and a good country, not to mention a good classroom.  …

My job is to catch and share as many good stories as I can, because stories are what we are, what we are made of, and if we don’t share good stories, then we will drown in poor stories, thin and shallow ones.

We in early childhood education are drowning in thin and shallow stories. Educators are drowning in poor stories that demean the worth of their work. Children are drowning in poor stories that frame their childhoods in the language of developmental checklists and school readiness. Families are drowning in poor stories that measure their children by benchmarks and learning goals and academic skills. We in early childhood education are sorely in need of good stories.

Brian Doyle helps us understand what makes a good story, and a good story-teller:

The coolest most amazing people I have met in my life are the ones who are interested in laughter and courage and grace under duress and holding hands against the darkness, and finding new ways to solve old problems, and being attentive and tender and kind to every sort of being, especially, of course, children, who are the coolest beings of all.

The educator-authors in the Reimagining Our Work (ROW) Story Collection tell good stories that grow from and nourish an educational culture anchored by “laughter and courage and grace under duress and holding hands against the darkness, and finding new ways to solve old problems, and being attentive and tender and kind to every sort of being.” The stories in the ROW Collection contribute to “a good life and a good family and a good city and a good country, not to mention a good classroom.” These books are an antidote to the commonplace poor, thin, shallow stories that dominate our field.

Good Stories from Educators 

Instead of stories that focus on compliance and assessment—stories that reduce educators and children to their performance on measurable outcomes—the stories in the ROW Collection call us into being ever more expansively human, in all its joy and grace and fear and courage and intelligence and kindness. They shape new insights into how we see children, ourselves, and the teaching and learning processes.

Each book in the ROW Story Collection is grounded in the foundational text From Teaching to Thinking: A Pedagogy for Reimagining Our Work, by the two of us. That book takes up central questions about the purpose and practices of education and offers a way to embrace professional learning that honors and enriches our humanity. The authors of the nine books in the ROW Collection use stories to illuminate the ideas in that foundational text, showing us what those ideas look like in practice.

Each ROW book tells a unique story about educators and children coming together with attentiveness, tenderness, kindness, and curiosity, finding new ways to solve old problems, to embolden courage, and to shape new possibilities for teaching and learning and living generously together.

Cup: A Vibrant Vessel of Learning and Creativity by Bridgette Towle and Angela Heape follows a group of children and their families in Aotearoa/New Zealand as they enact startling design ideas with simple plastic cups and an accompanying range of loose parts. As the building designs become increasingly complex and intricate, so, too, do the children’s—and the educators’—theories about design elements, about collaboration, and about problem-solving. Cup offers a reimagined understanding of the ways in which loose parts build relationships among children, educators, and families.

You Can’t Celebrate That! Navigating the Deep Waters of Social Justice Teaching by U.S. educator Nadia Jaboneta captures the courage and humility that anchor real conversations between educators and families. After a child in her diverse preschool class makes a biased comment to another child, Nadia partners with families to explore racial identity, religious celebrations, and racism. She draws on her courage and humility when she invites parents, co-workers, and supervisors to reimagine anti-bias teaching, finding depths and nuances that carry the community into relationships of trust, willing vulnerability, and courage.

Treasures in the Thicket: Exploring Children’s Visible Thinking | Tesoros en el monte: Una Exploración al pensamiento visible de los niños by U.S. educator Bethica Quinn with her co-teacher Rosalina Rodriguez lifts up children’s thinking and art-making as they pay careful, generous, open-hearted attention to the creatures who share their park.

This bilingual book in Spanish and English captures the sensitivity and insightfulness of children as they create a picture book about animals of San Francisco—and the sensitivity and insightfulness of their teachers, Bethica and Rosalina, as they bear generous witness to the children’s art-making and conversations. Tesoros en el monte helps us reimagine the ways in which we adults can bear witness to children’s understandings and insights.

A Can of Worms: Fearless Conversations with Toddlers by U.S. educator Nick Terrones begins with a simple question from a toddler about a worm. The question — about whether the worm is “a girl or a boy” — launches Nick into the disequilibrium of interrogating and revising his habitual ways of talking with children about gender, and that carries him to a reexamination of how he’s framed culture and race, as well. He asks children’s families to think with him about the questions he’s holding, and, together, they develop new commitments about how they’ll embrace children’s questions about identity. A Can of Worms shows us an educator reimagining how he wants to take up substantive conversations with children and with families.

Pursuing Bad Guys: Joining Children’s Quest for Clarity, Courage and Community by U.S. educator Donna King celebrates the uncertainty and willing vulnerability of educators finding new ways to engage the conundrums of age-old bad guy play, holding hands with each other as they step into new territory.

Donna and her co-teacher Sarah Meyer work with their pedagogical companion Pam Oken-Wright to join children’s research on goodness and badness, real and pretend, safety and courage. During that year-long exploration, they reimagine and live into invigorating new roles for themselves as educators.

Making Adjustments: Meditations on Learning with Children by U.S. educator Misa Okayama illuminates the shifts in understanding that happen when a teacher brings a tender heart and a mind alive with questions to her interactions with a child.

When a child describes the surprising intentions she held for her collaborative block building, Misa is startled to notice where she’d fallen into assumptions about children’s thinking and play. She uses that experience as an opportunity to reflect on the dispositions she wants to cultivate in herself as an educator and as a person. Making Adjustments illuminates how we can reimagine the role of values, culture, language and metaphors in our work, embracing them as essential resources for bringing our full selves to our teaching and learning.

El arte de crear problema: Una maestra desenmaraña el racismo | The Art of Troublemaking: A Teacher Unravels Racism by U.S. educator Olga Lacayo with Eliana Elias is a masterclass in courage, in grace under duress, in holding hands against the darkness of prejudice, bias, and racism.

When Olga encounters racism in her classroom, she challenges herself not to ignore the issue but to confront her colleagues and challenge them to do better. With the support of her pedagogical companion Eliana Elias, Olga steps into leadership at her school and in her community as an activist for anti-racist teaching and learning. A dual language resource in Spanish and English, El arte de crear problema is an invitation to reimagine the meaning and the necessary place of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) practices in education.

Reimagining Heartbreak: An Educator’s Journey to Reclaim Whole-Heartedness by Canadian educator Shelley Brandon glows with the attention, tenderness, and kindness of a teacher who cracks her heart open to children’s hearts.

Shelley and a group of toddlers spend regular time in the forest near their childcare center, and, on each visit, encounter marvels and griefs, fears and exultations and the deep joy of keeping company with the wild world and with each other. Shelley’s forest stories reveal the extraordinary beauty that’s available when we bring our full human hearts to our work, not holding ourselves at a teacherly remove.

Living in the House of Imagination: New Possibilities for Educators by Australian educators Ziying Bei Bei Liu and Susan James-Allan tells the story of children challenging their teachers to reclaim their imaginations—a challenge to discover new ways to think about themselves and the ways in which they move through the world.

As they join children to take up questions about the meanings and purposes of imagination and ideas, Bei Bei and Susan commit to pursuing those questions for themselves, as adults and as educators, not simply to provoke the children’s thinking but to expand their own understandings of the essential human capacities of intellect and imagination.

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Through Lines That Connect the ROW Stories

Each ROW book offers a unique and luminous story. The books can be read in any order and as stand-alones. However, the books are woven together by common threads of shared values and reflective practices, and those through lines create possibilities for the collection as a whole to become professional learning that is cohesive, generative, and profound, moving beyond the typical teacher education approach that focuses narrowly on one topic or module.

The through lines that connect the ROW books to each other and to the foundational text, From Teaching to Thinking, include:

• foregrounding issues of power, equity, and social justice;
  • you’ll see this most directly in: You Can’t Celebrate That!, A Can of Worms, Pursuing Bad Guys, Making Adjustments, and El arte de crear problema/ The Art of Troublemaking.

• linking values and pedagogy and aligning values with organizational culture and systems;
  • you’ll see this most directly in Pursuing Bad Guys, A Can of Worms, El arte de crear problema/ The Art of Troublemaking, Reimagining Heartbreak, and Living in the House of Imagination.

• using stories to spark imagination and inspire new possibilities;
  • you’ll see this most directly in Pursuing Bad Guys, Making Adjustments, Reimagining Heartbreak, and Living in the House of Imagination.

• drawing on the wisdom of children;
  • you’ll see this most directly in Cup, Treasures in the Thicket, A Can of Worms, Pursuing Bad Guys, Reimagining Heartbreak, and Living in the House of Imagination

• using a thinking protocol to enhance reflective practices;
  • you’ll see this most directly in Treasures in the Thicket, A Can of Worms, Pursuing Bad Guys, Making Adjustments, and El arte de crear problema/ The Art of Troublemaking.

• centering educator voices and agency;
  • you’ll see this most directly in all the books! The ROW Collection is authored by educators who reflect on their practice and pedagogy.

Each of the books has a foreword and a study guide to support meaning making, shifting the reading from a passive experience of listening to a good story to an active engagement with thinking and questioning. The books are solid ground for professional learning.

How Might You Use the ROW Collection for Professional Learning?

The ROW books are slight in size and mighty in the thinking, wondering, and reimagining that they hold. Unlike most texts in our field, which are typically authored by people who are at a remove from daily work alongside children, the ROW books are written by teachers in childcare and preschool programs. Each book offers a story from the classroom that has launched the educator-author into reflection and questioning and experimenting and finally into reimagining her or his or their work.

The ROW stories are not prescriptive, nor do they offer activities or ideas for curriculum undertakings. The authors don’t tell readers how to teach, or how to manage a classroom. They don’t give readers scripts to follow with children or with families; they don’t offer solutions to conundrums or direction for action.

Instead, each book shows us a teacher thinking, sometimes with children, sometimes with families, sometimes on her or his or their own, sometimes with a pedagogical companion. But always, thinking. And as we listen in on that thinking, we think, too. Our hope for these books is to carry readers from teaching, instructing, managing, and documenting to thinking. Thinking about the values and convictions that anchor their work. Thinking about the questions that compel them. Thinking about the stories that they want to tell—the stories for which they want to be known.

Each book in the ROW Story Collection holds the potential to spark this thinking. Studied as a collection, the books become a conversation about what happens when we listen to children with an expectation that we adults will be changed. We invite you to join and extend the conversation.

Some ways you might participate in the conversation with the ROW books:

• If you’re reading the books on your own rather than in a class or as part of a formal group: find a reading partner, or several. Invite a few friends to join you in a book group—friends who are educators, or not. Meet in person or by Zoom. Find a way to bust open your reading so that other people join you in thinking about the big ideas in the books.
• Choose a through line from the list above and read the books that engage that through line. You can do this in your book group or with a reading partner.

If you’re a program director, choose a through line as the professional learning focus for a school year and study the books as a staff, exploring the resonances and challenges that they hold for your work with the through line.

If you are an instructor in a continuing education or college program, choose a through line as the focus for your course and use the ROW books as your textbooks.

• Choose a ROW book as part of the study you’re already doing on a particular aspect of early childhood education. Some examples:
• In a college course on materials and classroom environments, use Cup, Making Adjustments, and Treasures in the Thicket/ Tesores en el monte as your texts.
• For a professional learning focus on anti-bias teaching, read You Can’t Celebrate That, A Can of Worms, and El arte de crear problema.
• If you or your learning community is studying the role of culture and language in early childhood contexts, Making Adjustments is a powerful text.
• If you’re exploring ways to reimagine your center’s documentation practices or if you’re teaching a course on documentation, read A Can of Worms, Reimagining Heartbreak, and Living in the House of Imagination.
• If your staff is wrestling with bad guy play, read Pursuing Bad Guys. And read Pursuing Bad Guys if you’re contemplating the role of a pedagogical companion. And read it if you’re curious about the power of storytelling with children.

This list could go on and on—because each ROW book is multi-faceted and complex, with the many threads of daily classroom life and practice woven into each story. Cup seems like a straightforward book about materials, but because the story takes place in the context of daily life in a full-day childcare center and is told by educators who think holistically about their work, it is a complex book that carries readers into other considerations. It is a book about materials, yes, and it is a book about documentation. It’s a book about collaborating with families. It’s a book about teacher research.

Each ROW book contains the same multitudes, because each ROW book takes place in the shared life of a group of children and adults thinking vigorously and feeling deeply, together.

• Each book has a study guide that follows the Thinking Lens protocol (described fully in From Teaching to Thinking). The study guides offer questions to focus your reflection and meaning-making, activating the experience of reading so that it becomes professional learning.
• As a book group or a college class or a program staff, reach out to the authors of the books you read; you can reach them at info@exchangepress.com. Invite an author to join your group in a Zoom discussion or to join you in person for a professional learning gathering in your ECE program.

A good story delights readers. It lifts readers into new insights and rekindles longings. The ROW books are good and delighting stories, and they will meet you in your longings to bring your full self to your work, in community with others who celebrate and honor childhood. We believe that the ROW books will provoke you into new possibilities for your work—and for your life—when you allow them their full reverberation.

The ROW Story Collection asks questions that will linger with you after you close the books, questions that will keep the conversation going, questions that will help you reimagine your work:

How can you tune yourself to the questions about being human that children ask—and that you may have forgotten or ignored in your adult life?

How can you expand your capacity to see with imagination, with empathy, with humility?

How can you continue to open yourself to children, so that their imagination, insights, courage, griefs, and discoveries change you?

Reference

Doyle,  B. (2016). Chicago. St Martin’s Press, NY