Cambridge College is an innovative leader in educating early childhood educators, offering a bachelor’s degree in Early Childhood Education and Care as well as a Early Childhood Teacher (PreK-2) master’s degree.
Cambridge College is based in Boston’s Charlestown neighborhood, and it also has a campus in Puerto Rico as well as courses that are offered online.
In this blog, we feature the stories of three early education faculty members who have rich visions about all that early educators should have the opportunity to learn.
* * * * *
Braiding education and diversity
When Cambridge College called Ronda Goodale in 2016 to ask her to chair their early education department, the call launched a new chapter in a long history of innovative education in Boston.
Goodale had been working in Boston for years doing almost everything there was to do in education. She was a psychologist and a schoolteacher and an adjunct faculty member. She worked with students who had severe special needs. She’d been involved in educational legal issues. She had helped students find private educational placements.
All these experiences would help her change the educational landscape for early educators.
Goodale, who is white, had been married to Bennie Lee Walker, who was Black, and had passed away in 2011, but he had also been an educator. He’d wanted to start an international high school, a goal that led to the creation of the Muriel S. Snowden International School.
Muriel Snowden and her husband, Otto, were well known in Boston as social activists and as the founders of Freedom House, a nonprofit organization that promotes social justice and economic self-sufficiency among Black, brown, and immigrant communities.
“So, when Cambridge College called,” Goodale recalls, “how did I know about them? Because Muriel Snowden was committed to it as a place where minorities could get credit for their work.” Snowden served on the college’s board from 1983 to 1986.
“I told them that I had certainly worked in early education, but that I had been working with all ages,” Goodale says. “But right away, I saw the potential of what we could do in a school that is so diverse and serves students of different ages.”
Goodale wanted to build the faculty and make it more diverse. Today, students in her department are taught by a group of faculty that includes Black women and Black men who work in early education, who are leaders in the field, and work hard to share their experiences with students.
“This means that all our students have role models.”
Goodale has also cut through red tape, ensuring that students can get credit for their work and that they don’t have to sit through classes covering material that they already know. Goodale also created Special Topics classes to focus on areas students are interested in. One class focuses on people of color in early education. Another class explored how to apply for grants in an early education setting. Another class was about folktales and storytelling.
And while many searly education degree programs end with a research-based capstone project, Goodale decided to create more options, freeing students to do more creative projects such as working with parents or creating a media campaign.
“They can do something,” Goodale says, “that shows the culmination of their full knowledge of early education.”
* * * * *
Centering equity
As a Cambridge College adjunct early education professor, Darnell Williams has a detailed answer to the question: What do teachers need to know?
“Teachers need a solid foundation in understanding students’ cultures and backgrounds. Many of our students are multilingual. Many of our students have disabilities. Many of our students come from diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds. And the teaching workforce isn’t fully prepared for that,” Williams says.
“We also live in an environment that’s increasingly anti-Black and patriarchal. So teachers need to come into the profession being acutely aware of their social and cultural positionality, recognizing their power and privilege.”
“From an early education standpoint, teachers also need a deep understanding of human and child development. Many teachers understand the content of a curriculum, but they don’t know how to teach that curriculum when there are so many variables and social identities.
Williams’ perspective is rooted in experience. He has worked as an elementary and middle school teacher in Cambridge’s Benjamin Banneker Charter Public School. He has worked in the juvenile justice system, training teachers and administrators who work with incarcerated youth. And he has designed and delivered professional development programs for teachers, principals, and educational leaders across the country.
Among the courses Williams teaches at Cambridge College is a Special Topics class called “Understanding Race, Class, Gender and Disability Issues from Birth to Age 8.”
In the course, Williams centers equity and justice in every conversation.
“We have truthful conversations, and I push my students to be vulnerable. To me, a courageous conversation isn’t that we have an idea about race or class, it’s that we’re willing to be vulnerable.”
To create a safe, engaging teaching space, Williams sets standards for class interactions. He talks about academic inquiry. He creates opportunities for conversations. He has students analyze videos as a way to start talking about how to analyze their own conversations. And he taps into the differences between a fixed mindset and a growth mindset.
“A lot of my students come in with a fixed mindset, but throughout the course they undergo a conversion that goes beyond their grade in the class. The most important thing is to create an experience that enables them to talk about how they’ve grown.”
“There’s a process of self-discovery and of building a common language for building racial literacy and understanding disability and multiculturalism. They have language for complex identities. They are able to notice what’s going on in early education settings, and they can name what they see. Because before you can interrupt injustices and inequities, you have to be able to name them. And then we also talk about problem-solving strategies.”
Those inequities can be lack of access to resources or higher expulsion rates or teachers whose sympathy for students from disadvantaged backgrounds causes them to lower their expectations.
Perhaps the most important lesson Williams teaches is to keep an eye on the most vulnerable children in early education settings.
“Working in education from a place of equity, you have to think about the most marginalized students. If you can fix things for them, that’s going to fix things for other students. Sometimes we settle for universalism, we beef up education across the board for all students, so they all improve a little bit, but that doesn’t change the inequities, and the gaps between students remain wide.”
* * * * *
Changing lives by teaching history
Adjunct professor Tracey Phillips-Williams taught a Special Topics course on the history of early educators that has been upgraded to an elective.
She’d like to see it become a requirement.
“There’s an article we read about the schools that were developed in the 1800s when people were enslaved,” Phillips-Williams says. “There were clandestine schools and Sabbath schools [held on Sundays for free and enslaved Black people]. And every time I teach the class and we read the article, students say, Oh, I didn’t know that. Nobody taught me that.”
It’s a knowledge gap that Phillips-Williams keeps filling to inspire her students.
The class reads the book “Reminiscences of School Life, and Hints on Teaching” by Fanny Jackson Coppin, who was brought out of slavery by an aunt, and who went on to become an educator. Students compare Coppin’s pedagogy with that of the well-known education theorists they also learn about.
“Back then,” Phillips-Williams says, “Black schools were interested in Frobel.” Friedrich Frobel was a German educator who came to focus on preschool education and the importance of play. “He’s the father of kindergarten, the European part of it, and people of color adopted that way of teaching.”
What Phillips-Williams wants her students to get from her class “is that there were people who looked like them who contributed to early childhood education and care.”
“So, when my students who become teachers see their classrooms, my hope is that they remember Fanny Jackson Coppin, Gholdy Muhammad, Zaretta Hammond, and Kelly Miller, and that they will treat the children in front of them differently.”
The course also covers Betsey Stockton who was enslaved as a child in the home of Princeton University President Ashbel Green and went on to become an educator and a missionary to the Sandwich Islands in the Pacific.
“A lot of the women we talk about were missionaries or teachers who went to Africa or Hawaii or other places,” Phillips-Williams says, “and I want my students to know that they can do that, too. They can go to other places and help the children there.”
One of Phillips-Williams’ students studied Marva Collins, a Black educator, who, in 1975, opened the Westside Preparatory school in her home in Chicago. It was the beginning of a career that led Collins to a White House job and then back to Chicago to supervise some of the worst-performing schools. The result for Phillips-Williams’ student? The research project transformed her teaching perspective and her life.
Some of these history lessons also exposed Phillips-Williams’ students to blatant and brutal racism, leaving some students stunned and others angry.
“But then we looked at the tenacity of the people we were learning about and their willpower,” Phillips-Williams says. “We talked about what it would be like to have to have someone teach you to read as an adult or what it would be like to be enslaved and have to work first before you could go to school or study.”
Another lesson Phillips-Williams hopes her students learn: shed limits.
“There’s no reason why my students can’t dream big or shoot for bigger. That’s what college is supposed to do for them. They shouldn’t just be thinking, I’m going to get a degree and get a job.
“I want them to find the spark that makes them realize that any of them can be ‘the first’ to do something that extends the history of Black and brown pioneers in early education and care.”