Living a Philosophy of Early Childhood Education: A Festschrift for Harriet Cuffaro. Occasional Paper Series 32

This issue is a Festschrift in honor of Harriet K. Cuffaro, a Bank Street College faculty member from 1968-1998. A Festschrift--a volume reflecting the values, theories, and passions of a senior scholar in a field--seeks to offer scholarship that builds on these contributions. Harriet Cuffaro has touched and shaped more lives of teachers, scholars, and colleagues than can possibly be counted. A teacher in her soul, and an esteemed scholar of John Dewey, Harriet has "unfolded and connected" essential Deweyan ideas and made them accessible and meaningful in the lives of teachers. This Festschrift reflects the core ideas that Harriet brought to the field of early childhood education and the study of John Dewey. Above all, Harriet reminds others that to teach means to have a philosophy of education, to articulate the whys of what teachers do, and to understand that it is this philosophy that guides and shapes the decisions made in the classroom. Individual essays in this Festschrift include: (1) One Perspective on Harriet Cuffaro: A Story of Engagement and Experience (Celia Genishi); (2) Thinking Through Early Childhood (Jonathan Silin); (3) When Unit Blocks Came to Gardaborg (Kristín Einarsdóttir); (4) The Experience of Working and Learning Together (Jane Clarke); (5) Caroline Pratt: Progressive Pedagogy "In Statu Nascendi" (Jeroen Staring); (6) An Inquiry into the Pedagogical Implications of Dewey's Ecological Thinking (Simon Jorgenson); (7) Doing Dewey (Carol Rodgers) [Contains Appendix: "Whispers on the Moon"]; and (8) Presence in Double Vision (Miriam Raider-Roth). Individual essays include references and figures.