A deeply meaningful piece but I fear that there are many classrooms for young children and more for those who are older in which questions are not even heard nor are there opportunities for questions to be raised.
Yes. I worry that this has to do, in part, with the distrust of teachers that has bubbled up in recent years. When teachers are afraid of the consequences of simply choosing the wrong books for their classroom libraries, creating space for these difficult questions and conversations can feel very risky and frightening.
After 9/11, I remember a class of three year olds who kept building block towers and knocking them down over and over. It then occurred to me that by watching the event on TV they must have thought it was happening over and over. Parents needed to shield children from those terrible images on TV.
A deeply meaningful piece but I fear that there are many classrooms for young children and more for those who are older in which questions are not even heard nor are there opportunities for questions to be raised.
Yes. I worry that this has to do, in part, with the distrust of teachers that has bubbled up in recent years. When teachers are afraid of the consequences of simply choosing the wrong books for their classroom libraries, creating space for these difficult questions and conversations can feel very risky and frightening.
After 9/11, I remember a class of three year olds who kept building block towers and knocking them down over and over. It then occurred to me that by watching the event on TV they must have thought it was happening over and over. Parents needed to shield children from those terrible images on TV.
Yes, I think there were many block corner and easel painting recreations when 9/11 dominated the news. There's a preschool downtown that documented the children's processing of 9/11: https://www.youngestwitnesses.com/ And Bank Street dedicated an Occasional Paper issue to it: https://educate.bankstreet.edu/occasional-paper-series/vol2003/iss11/