Final Exit Slip Oscar Newman

Prompt: In what ways has your understanding about early childhood development, learning or
education shifted over the past quarter?

I completed coursework in early childhood development and learning over 20 years

ago as part of Master's coursework. I became familiar with Piaget, Erikson, Vygotsky and

other aspects of the childhood psychology canon, and learned these approaches are

incomplete in understanding the diversity of human experience. This was something we

discussed openly in the course at the time, but we relied more upon our work as classroom

teachers than that of more contemporary theorists.

As a result, the greatest benefit for me in this course was to learn about the work of

Bronfenbrenner and Rogoff and apply it to the work of public education. There are two shifts

to my thinking. First, Piaget, Vygotsky, and Erikson continue to be interesting and informative

lenses with which to explore development and learning. There are reasons they continue to

be studied, and I wasn't certain I was going to leave the course with that appreciation.

Second, the work of the aforementioned scholars can only be seriously considered if we open

up the exploration of childhood and development to a wider variety of experiences.

Additionally, learning about the diversity of human development is vitally important to

educators in a multicultural, pluralistic, democratic society – the potentials for

miscommunication are great and the ability of teachers to leverage knowledge to improve

learning outcomes for all students is a profound opportunity. As one important example,

learning about the rules under which another cultural group operates can be a way of

realizing that one's own cultural group operates under rules, i.e., negotiated choices, for the

first time.

Finally, the experience of having intensely studied childhood, development, and

learning at two very different stages of my personal, social life has been a profound
experience. I interpret learning about approaches to children and their development very

differently as a parent and educator with a lot of experience, and I would recommend that

experience to fellow experienced educators who have the opportunity to reevaluate their

understanding of childhood, development, and learning.