By: Diane Kashin, Ed. D, RECE. I feel like I lived a year in a month. In my last blog post, I revealed that I spent last year battling breast cancer and have stepped into 2020 as a survivor. I left for a holiday with my husband 10 days after my last radiation treatment. We … Continue reading
Filed under Pedagogical Documentation …
Pedagogical Documentation: Sharing Stories of Meaning
By: Diane Kashin, Ed. D, RECE. Constructivist theory in education suggests that learners are the makers of meaning. This theory is especially relevant in early learning. Meaning-making refers to the personal epistemology that learners create to help them make sense of influences, relationships and sources of knowledge in their world. Teachers create experiences for learners … Continue reading
Sparking Inquiry from Children’s Emerging Interests
By: Diane Kashin, Ed. D, RECE. My last blog A Provoking Post on Provocations garnered some great comments and Twitter conversations that have sparked deep thinking about the process of pedagogy and curriculum in the early years. When I began my career as an early childhood educator I was fascinated by planning and programming. I … Continue reading
From Broken to Open: Inspiring Circle Experiences for Young and Old
By: Diane Kashin, Ed. D, RECE. I use this blog to share reflections and musings about the practice of early childhood education. In a recent post, The Broken Circle: Rethinking the Practice of Circles in Early Learning I wrote about a topic that fascinated me as a beginning teacher. Currently, circles continue to spiral in and out … Continue reading
Creating Places of Belonging for Learning in Early Childhood Education
By: Diane Kashin, Ed. D, RECE. Recently I experienced the power of place when I spent the weekend in Pennsylvania at Lehigh Carbon Community College (LCCC). I was invited by LCCC’s Teacher Education program to do a morning and afternoon workshop featuring loose parts to help launch its 32nd annual celebration of the Week of … Continue reading
Where Have all the Projects Gone? Musings about Inquiry in Early Childhood Education
By: Diane Kashin, Ed.D, RECE and Cindy Green, BSc, RECE. We have written about our long-standing relationship in previous posts and how we connected when we were working at the same community college, teaching early childhood education, many moons ago! We became critical friends, before we knew the term. In our context, we were pedagogical … Continue reading
Child-Initiated Play and Learning: Teacher-Framed Documentation and Reflection
By: Diane Kashin, Ed.D, RECE. When I began the journey to learn and understand emergent curriculum, I would not have believed that 20 years later, I would still be reflecting and wondering. Now, I know that I can never arrive at a place where I can say that I know everything that there is to … Continue reading
As Inspired by the Reggio Emilia Approach: Using Children’s Books to Invite Multiple Perspectives
By: Diane Kashin, Ed.D, RECE I have written about perspective before. Perspective is a fascinating word for it can be defined in multiple ways. Perspective is: A particular way of seeing something. To think about a situation or problem in a wise and reasonable way. To compare something to other things so it can be … Continue reading
Pedagogy in Early Childhood Education: The Art of Teaching and Learning
By: Diane Kashin, Ed.D, RECE and Cindy Green, RECE. I (Diane) don’t remember when I first heard the word pedagogy but if memory serves me well, I started to really think about the term when I began to study the Reggio Emilia Approach to early learning in the late nineties. I kept coming across the term … Continue reading
Building Relationships in Early Learning: One Tea Cup at a Time
By: Diane Kashin, Ed.D, RECE. I am a lover of coffee, but I have been thinking a lot about tea lately. Actually, it has been a couple of years now that I have been making connections between tea and relationship building in early learning. A few years ago I discovered the video, “Mint Tea and a … Continue reading