CREATE – An Ongoing Design Adventure

The process of designing and implementing Communities as Resources in Early Childhood Teacher Education is grounded in design-based research. This blog will inform the research—and you—about our work. We intend our audience to be broad. We would like for the entire early childhood community (teachers, families, teacher educators, community members) to interact with us as we share our ongoing work with you. We would also like for teacher educators who are not in early childhood, but who are committed to field intensive, clinically based teacher education, to be a part of our audience.

Wherever possible, without violating confidentiality and without identifying individuals we will share our stories of working with one another to create CREATE. One year into the process we can tell you that our collaboration has been greatly improved by scheduling regular meetings, assigning specific roles and responsibilities, and monitoring our communication for intended and unintended messages with one another and with our school and community partners. We can also tell you that as we university-based educators learn to work more productively with one another we are becoming more and more aware of how the structure of our work and the structure of our school and community partners’ work greatly impact the nature of our collaborative work. In future blogs we will talk about things such as the ways issues of space are being resolved and the ways in which issues of time continue to perplex us. We will reflect on the curriculum and the professional development activities that you can see in other areas of this website. We will share our assessment and research processes.

Every two weeks one of the CREATE team members will post a blog that describes the challenges we are encountering, solutions we are testing, or dilemmas that have no obvious resolution. Our initial blogs will be university-focused, but our district and community partners will soon join the blogosphere to share their experiences, joys and concerns.

We would like to invite you into our process—to dialogue with us and help shape our work and our interpretations of that work. Please write back to us. Ask us questions. Offer us your insights. Share your own work. Become our co-CREATEors.