Search results

Putting this volume together of this type took a team effort from many individuals who have given of their time and talent. I would really like to express my thanks to all who reviewed chapters for this volume: Mary Lu Love Early Childhood Services at ICI; Nancy Crowell, Georgetown University; Xuejin (Kim) Lu, Children's Services Council of Palm Beach County, FL; Jianping Shen, Western Michigan University; Xin Ma, University of Kentucky; Maria Magdalena Aguilar-Crandall, Brownsville Independent School District; Stuart Reifel, University of Texas at Austin; Deborah Wisneski, University of Wisconsin Milwaukee; Amye Warren, The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga; Sarah Jo Sandefur, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga; and Shira Peterson, Children's Institute. My colleagues here at the University of Texas Brownsville, Renee Rubin, Vejoya Viren, Jaime Garcia, and Ana Laura Rodriguez-Garcia were also of great assistance in reviewing articles.

Global interest in early care and education has been growing. The Association for Childhood Education International has declared 2012–2022 the Decade for Childhood. They call for an increased focus on childhood from many disciplines and agents. Large research studies are also being conducted that are focused on early childhood education in many different contexts. In 2010, Education International published Early Childhood Education: A Global Scenario. This study examined early childhood policies from 17 countries. In looking at early childhood globally they found that in many countries early care is fragmented, that ECE teaching staff are overwhelmingly female, less trained, and have poorer working conditions than educators working with older children. Access to early education is more limited in developing countries especially in rural areas.

This chapter is a qualitative study on how an Early Childhood Educator Professional Development grant impacted early childhood educators and their literacy practices. This chapter also discusses how the grant impacted the researcher who was also an instructional specialist working with the educators as part of the professional development.

The professional development changed practitioners’ literacy practices by encouraging them to improve children's access to books, to increase read alouds, to change literacy activities and to improve access to writing materials. These changes were also reflected in the experiences of the instructional specialist who also altered her own life.

Maria Magdalena Aguilar-Crandall, Ed.D., is a librarian in the Brownsville Independent School District and an adjunct professor at Sam Houston State University.