Building Bridges: Curricula Notes
The Arts, Equity, Democracy and Inclusion Community Curriculum for Transitional Kindergarten
by
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“Knowledge grows out of belief that has been subject to reflection.”
Maxine Greene
“Talmud starts with “Why”? That’s a great gift to give a kid—the right to be curious.”
Frank Gehry
Transparency, focus, and trust are essential elements of a community-based project. We are stating what we believe and how we intend to shape approaches to education. We intend to help build bridges between educators in the early years 0-6, K-12, and Higher Education and Policy Advocates.
We want to create a space for dialogue, shared action research, collaboration, and articulation of philosophies, strategies, and exploratory rich connections. We hope to allow this to be an honest, respectful, and thought provoking conversation between us, you the reader, and our fellow educators, friends, neighbors, and community members.
We hope to provoke diplomatic conversation surrounding aspects of understanding who we teach, what we believe, how we position ourselves in conversation, and if we allow meaning to be the thread of this tapestry of learning experiences we call education.
We hope you will continue to converse with us through the years in collaborative forums and dialogue groups to share your practice, inquiries, and research with young learners. We hope you will engage our children’s literature either in hard copy or online and use our books or your favorites at home to read as a family to encounter many lively topics of conversation: We hope to share the love of learning.
With many years of commitment to service and to one another as learners, we hope to share what we truly believe may be the most culturally responsive, inclusive, arts-inquiry based curriculum we can.
Collectively, we have each worked passionately for equity excellence and justice-focused access and innovation in many aspects of our educational careers and personal lives and seek holistic, open and healthy relationships with our peers and community members. We care. We believe in growth. We believe in the power and beauty of collaboration and community. We believe children can innovate and create their visions of the world via multiple expressions.
We hope to inspire, encourage, and challenge you to consider this collaboration as it seeks to build bridges to learning for all children in every context and with special rights belonging to our human family as vitally important and valued members of our fragile and vibrant democracy.
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About the Book
Children develop on an exponential basis, and teachers must guide them in a conscientious manner.
This community-based curriculum promotes supporting teachers, parents, and especially children. The conceptual framework places the child at the center and seeks to bring together multiple perspectives to allow for inquiry in every contextual experience.
The contributors argue that we must:
• endeavor to continuously create a child-centered, research-based curriculum that is inclusive, innovative, sensitive, holistic, progressive, global, and democratic;
• support the importance of multiple perspectives shaping our dialogue and our community;
• envision learning as a series of joyful discoveries that prepare children to reach into their creative capacities and develop a lifelong love of learning.
We must embrace philosophical discourse in order to grow as people and as active members of our communities – and we must see children as people with rights, inherent value, knowledge, competencies, and understanding.
Examine the ways we educate children with a holistic, caring, and dynamic perspective and start helping students succeed with the findings and insights in Building Bridges.
About the Author
Dr. Debra E.S. Bogle has guided children for over 25 years as a classroom teacher in elementary, middle and high school. She is a Reading Recovery Teacher, and has served as a curriculum coach, master teacher, curricula writer, ELL teacher, ELL director and content coaching mentor in three countries and five states. Having earned her doctorate in Urban Education and Leadership at the University of Southern California, she currently teaches in the Masters of Teaching program and the Reading Authorization program at USC, where she wrote the foundational course curriculum. Dr. Bogle serves on several advisory boards and is active in P.E.O. She is committed to building access in education for all women. She is a mother of two and grandmother and resides in Southern California. She is often in her adopted home writing, cooking, baking, listening to music, perusing art, exploring and enjoying the countryside with her family and friends in France.