Pre-Primary Sources

Coloring Pages and Creativity, with Tiffany Pearsall

While there isn't often a hard and fast rule, coloring pages are often looked at as "busy work" or as having no place in a child led classroom, with beliefs about the potential for negative impact on children's creativity and discovery. Why would a child want to learn to draw independently if we have pages already made with all of the pictures they could want to draw! Surprisingly, there's very limited research on coloring pages and their impact on creativity... or anything else for young children. 
 
References:
Creative and Mental Growth (Third Edition) Viktor Lowenfeld
Nurturing Creativity: An Essential Mindset for Young Children’s Learning by Rebecca Isbell and Sonia Akiko Yoshizawa
Coloring-Book-Type Experiences and Children's Divergent Pictorial Production* N. ASHLEY RANDALL, JR.; THOMAS W. DRAPER
 
Music from:
Audio File URL:
https://pixabay.com/music/upbeat-retro-electronica-284413/

Teacher as Researcher, with Alexandra Dutton

The Reggio Emilia approach values the idea of the teacher as researcher; program director Alexandra Dutton, of Old Firehouse School, has nearly 20 years of experience supporting educators in their role as researcher of their own group of children. 
 
Find Fireside Chats on the Young Mind wherever you get your podcasts!

Critical vs. Radical Scholarship

Before we talk about specific research in early childhood, I wanted to talk about the history of the institution of science-- how it has served to both expand human knowledge and block out those it has deemed "unfit" to be in its halls, how unintentional bias and purposeful bigotry have made and maintained their way in, and how modern scholars can work to expand the canon of what we know and how we know it. Lizz talks with Dr. Bee, a professor of sociology, about bias, science, and what it means to be a radical scholar. 

Coming Soon

Coming soon: Pre-Primary Sources!