Workshop and Speaking Topics
National & Local Workshops
Increasing Agency in Early Childhood Education: Ways to help young children work collaboratively and expand their capabilities through increased abilities to influence and making decisions about their own learning.
How Young Children Build Community: Ways that young children work together, help one another and advocate for their space, the natural world and their classmates as a way to build community. Workshop includes opportunities to look closely at how young children try to help one another and how to increase the opportunities for children to authentically practice authentic and culturally-relevant community-building
Project Based Learning in Early Childhood Education: Strategies and examples for using projects and other long-term learning experiences in grades preK-3rd. Workshop includes ideas for pedagogy, curriculum, involving parents and communities and organizing the classroom environment.
Civic Agency and Young Children: Ideas for and examples of how young children can practice social-emotional-cultural-civic capbilties in everyday classroom life. The emphasis in this workshop is how to make social-emotional learning an embodied process this is experienced by children rather than static lessons or lectures.
Young Children and Their Parents Need to Talk about Discrimination: Motivation and ideas to help young children understand, recognize and feel empowered to act when confronted with discrimination at school or in larger communities. The focus of this workshop is encouraging the kinds of conversations that lead towards noticing and acting against discrimination.
Young Children and Social Justice Curriculum: Classroom-based approaches and materials that are appropriate for young children's understanding of inequity across a range of domains. All examples include ways to help children act towards addressing social injustices in ways that are community supported and build on family and community values.
Impact of Discrimination on Young Children's Schooling Experiences: Awareness and strategies for administrators to think about ways in which young children face discrimination early in their schooling lives and how to make early schooling (preK-3rd) more equitable for children and their families.
Learning Stories and Agency-supportive Assessments: Exploration and examples of using learning stories and portfolio-style assessments to deepen teacher understandings of children as well as foster healthy and reciprocal family/school relationships.
Conference Presentations & Research Talks
Increasing/Supporting Agency in Early Childhood Classrooms
Agency, Capability and Young Children of Immigrants: Applying Humanistic Economics to First Grade. American Educational Research Association: Chicago, 2014
Towards Capability: Agency and the Education of Young Children. American Educational Research Association: San Francisco, 2013
Agency as Capability: Using humanistic economics and postcolonial theory to rethink early childhood achievement trajectories. Reconceptualizing Early Childhood Education Conference: Pennsylvania State University, 2012
Revitalizing and Rethinking Young Children of Immigrants’ Agency for Cultural Relativity, Capacity/Capability and the Achievement-oriented Policymaker. Invited Lecture, AERA 2012 – Critical Perspectives in Early Childhood Business Meeting.
Supporting Young Children's Agency in PreK-3 for Academic and Social Development and Multiple versions of childhood: Preschool examples from Japan, India, Germany and the U.S. Invited Lectures, Brigham Young University, November 2011.
Teaching Young Children of Immigrants
Preschool Teachers and Immigrant Families in Four U.S. Cities: Examples from the Children Crossing Borders study. American Educational Research Association Annual Conference; New Orleans 2011
Teaching Children of Immigrants and the Dilemma of Being Culturally Responsive. American Educational Research Association; Denver, 2010
Immigrant and Nonimmigrant Teachers’ Conceptualizations of Diversity and Childhood in five U.S. Cities: The Chancla Debate. American Anthropological Association; Philadelphia, 2009
Teaching Young Latina(o) Children of immigrants in Four U.S. Cities: Findings from the Children Crossing Borders Project. Triennial Conference on Latino Education and Immigrant Integration; Athens, GA, 2009
Racial Equity, Cultural Diversity & Social Justice
Learning who was and was not a Slave: Pedagogy for Racial Inquiry in Early Childhood Classrooms. American Educational Research Association Annual Conference; Vancouver, 2012
Developing Cultural Flexibility in Young Children and Early Childhood Scholars: Ideas from an Urban Preschool Teacher in Bangalore, India. American Educational Research Association Annual Conference; New Orleans 2011
How children Build Community
Types of Classroom-Based, Civic Action Observed in Two to Five year olds: A Preliminary Comparative Analysis. Society for Research in Child Development, Austin, TX, March 2017.
Working with Immigrant Parents
Early Childhood Education Barriers between Immigrant Parents and Teachers within the New Latina(o) Diaspora. American Educational Research Association Annual Conference; New Orleans 2011
"We Don’t know the People": White Teachers and Preschool Immigrant Families in the New Latino Diaspora. Ethnography and Education Annual Conference – University of Pennsylvania 2011
Immigrant Parents and Preschool. National Association for Multicultural Education Annual Conference; Phoenix, AZ: 2006
The Ethnographic Method in Early Childhood
Learning From Many Voices: How the Preschool In Three Cultures Method Makes Implicit Teaching Practices and Cultural Beliefs Explicit. American Anthropological Association: San Francisco, 2012
Contextuality and Early Childhood Education: Examples from the Children Crossing Borders Study American Anthropological Association Annual Conference 2010
The Theoretical and Practical Development of Qualitative Coding Frameworks. First Things First Initiative – research & evaluation collaborative of the University of Arizona, Arizona State University and Northern Arizona University. Consultant on project/funding evaluation.
Caring for Infants in an Indian Orphanage: The use of film in ethnographic research to respond to community concerns. Reconceptualizing Early Childhood Education; Victoria, British Columbia, 2008
Using Anthropological Theory to look at Educational Issues: A case study from the U.S. Christ College-Bangalore University, India. May, 2007
