By Patricia “Patsy” M. Cooper
Author’s Note
Barbara T. Bowman (1928–2024) was the Irving B. Harris Professor of Child Development at Erikson Institute, which she co-founded in 1966 and where she served as president from 1994 to 2000. She was also a prolific researcher and commentator, past president of NAEYC (1980–1982), former chief officer of early childhood education for the Chicago Public Schools (2004–2012), and former education advisor to the Obama administration.
The spark for this article came out of a 2021 interview Bowman gave on the state of early childhood education and teacher preparation in which she asserted the field had become out of touch with child development theory. Given the depth of Bowman’s knowledge and seven‑decades‑long experience in the field, I was curious to learn more about what led her to this conclusion. Over the course of 2022, she and I engaged in a series of informal conversations, during which time I also revisited her published work and public commentary. My end goal in writing this article was to create a more comprehensive framework for understanding Bowman’s viewpoint on the relationship between child development and classroom practice than could be gleaned from the short interview or dialogue format.
All text taken directly from my notes on our verbal or written exchanges is cited as personal communication (i.e., personal communication, 2022). Bowman reviewed the text in its entirety.
Learning from Barbara Bowman
Principles of development are the same for all children, even though their behavior may be quite different.
—Barbara T. Bowman
Barbara T. Bowman’s contributions to early childhood education over the course of seven decades have been felt at every level, including teacher education, professional development, public policy, and research. A long‑term concern for her was the need to prepare teachers whose practice is critically and positively informed by children’s experiences at home and in the community. Bowman long argued, however, that “[t]eacher education gives lip service to the importance of family/community contexts in high‑quality care and education and then ignores it in the field” (personal communication, 2022).
A manifestation of the problem is what she referred to as “half‑truths” about child development that dominate praxis with negative results. “All half‑truths,” Bowman contended, “have a germ of truth that causes them to get repeated and accepted.” But they also become fertile ground for teacher biases when family and community habits deviate from teachers’ assumptions about healthy families or acceptable behavior (personal communication, 2022). For example, although it is widely believed all children thrive best in a loving and caring environment, it is not true all families and cultures express love and care in the same way, even when it comes to such basics as feeding and sleeping. The significance of differences between family/community contexts and teachers’ expectations becomes especially acute when applied to Black and Brown children and children from families with low incomes.
Bowman said the only “whole” truth about development all early childhood teachers must abide by is that every child can develop and learn. “Principles of development are the same for all children,” she said, “even though their behavior may be quite different. The latter naturally calls for particular and/or localized responses” (emphasis hers). Teachers should not assume, however, that children and families cannot respond to larger social systems and their meanings (like school) if provided applicable support in a timely fashion. “Children, families, and communities can adapt to changing conditions,” as exemplified by their success in becoming both bilingual and bicultural, often as a result of schooling, she said (personal communication, 2022).
This article draws on personal communication with Bowman, as well as her published work and public commentary, to explore four common practices in early childhood education that Bowman contends teachers approach through the damaging lens of half‑truths: Relation‑based teaching, school readiness, the role of play, and beginning reading instruction. (The last two common practices can be found in the originally published, online version of this article at NAEYC.org/resources/pubs/yc/fall2023/family-community-contexts.)
Family/Community Contexts in Child Development Theory
The field doesn’t really understand itself. Child development is relevant.
—Barbara T. Bowman
Bowman defined family/community contexts as “the family’s interpretation of its identity in the community and the place of that community in the larger national or international community. From this view, differences and diversity in family contexts are expected and, in general, lead to healthy development” (personal communication, 2022). On the face of it, Bowman’s suggestion that child development has become irrelevant in the early childhood field is extremely provocative. After all, what is the evidence that knowledge of child development is no longer central to teacher preparation or in the field at large? Most early childhood teacher education programs require at least exposure to, if not a dedicated course in, the work of recognized theorists, particularly Western developmentalists like Erik Erikson and Jean Piaget and sociocultural theorists like Lev S. Vygotsky. Applications of child development theory also surface regularly in various methods courses. Indeed, the framework of developmentally appropriate practice (NAEYC 2020) as a method for promoting child development and learning draws heavily on the three major traditions of development theory—developmental, behavioral, and critical (Cohen & Waite-Stupiansky 2023).
Pragmatic by nature, Bowman never wasted energy on mere provocation. She believed child development theory automatically assumes that teachers should recognize that family/community contexts influence children’s approaches to learning, academic needs, and so on. However, a central theme in Bowman’s work is that too many classroom teachers base their practices on a homogenized conception of child development that embodies White, Western, middle‑class family norms, including regular use of formal English, linear storytelling, and self‑directed play. Bowman argued, “While these skills are ultimately important to young children’s success in school, teachers can be blinded by them and assume there is something wrong with children who do not arrive in school already knowing them” (personal communication, 2022). The result, she continued, “is whole populations of American children are judged impaired before they have even had the opportunity to acquire new knowledge and adapt to school expectations” (Bowman 1994; Bowman & Ray 2012). Teacher condemnation can quickly ensue: Children’s families have failed to prepare them for school.
Bowman further reminded us that even when poverty and worse make it impossible for family and community contexts to provide even the basics of a healthy environment, teachers must not underestimate children’s potential. Local and worldwide differences are not only to be expected but should be respected, supported, and accommodated in the classroom. “Even the most pernicious [environments] may have the elements to support development. One has only to watch children play on a garbage mountain or learn to read with dirt for a slate and a stick for a pencil to understand the vigor of communities and individuals” (personal communication, 2022).
The Roots of Bowman’s Work
Barbara Bowman’s emphasis on the primacy of the home‑school relationship in child development was rooted in her own family/community context and experiences as an African American child of an educated family growing up in the Midwest during the Depression and World War II. She started nursery school at age 2 in her segregated Black community, where Black teachers emphasized the acquisition of school skills. She spent a large part of her education and life in communities other than her own, attending largely White schools while living in a Black neighborhood created by racism and poverty—isolated and with extremely limited opportunities—in segregated Chicago. She graduated from Sarah Lawrence College and taught at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools. Then, she began teaching and started a family in Iran in the late 1950s and early 1960s, which deepened her belief in the simultaneous universality and essential influence of family and community contexts in development.
A decisive influence on Bowman’s work beyond her early life and education was Erik Erikson’s (1950/1985) theory of human development. According to Erikson, human development reflects the inexorable collusion of biological, psychological, and social forces, which are dominated from birth by stage‑related challenges and have long‑term effects on how genes are expressed. Healthy individual development depends on the successful resolution of these challenges. “This perspective,” said Bowman, “reinforces the belief that all communities provide similar funds of raw material for development” (personal communication, 2022). Importantly, though, development can be particularized across cultures, as in Bowman’s pioneering work in multicultural early childhood education (1992, 1994).
In developing equity‑minded understandings and actions, Bowman posited two key questions about family/community contexts: What is the knowledge young children bring from home, and what approach to learning do children bring from home? “Social contexts in early childhood impact the rest of children’s lives, create frameworks for the future” (personal communication, 2022). For Bowman, the default in school and teaching should be educational parity for all, not curricular or instructional sameness.
The Half-Truth of Relation-Based Teaching
The universal bio-psychological growth and community identity are essential components of high-quality preschool and primary programs.
—Barbara T. Bowman
Caring or relation‑based teaching leans on the understanding that all aspects of in‑school development and learning are enhanced when children feel recognized and cared for by their teachers. For Bowman, classroom pragmatics in relation‑based teaching necessarily include an atmosphere of “warmth and love . . . all day, all the time.” For example, the infant‑toddler teacher, acting like a family member, practices the physical intimacy very young children need when the teacher “[e]njoys the baby up against the body [and] holds, hugs, pats, stimulates, and talks as a matter of course” (personal communication, 2022). Caring is also present when teachers support toileting, sleeping, and eating in the classroom. Or when they help children through hand‑over‑hand physical experiences, such as moving puzzle pieces, holding a pencil, shoe tying, assisting with putting on and taking off winter clothing, and climbing playground equipment.
Just as importantly, relation‑based teaching sets the stage to enhance (or deprive) children’s cognitive development in school, as evidenced by teachers investing in and nurturing the academic achievement of all children, including Black and Brown children and children from families with low incomes. (Academic learning and success is one of the three principles of Ladson-Billings’s [1995] widely acclaimed model of culturally responsive pedagogy.) Stressing the need for developmental harmony in the early childhood curriculum, Bowman insisted, “All [physical, social, and cognitive care] must be present in the early childhood curriculum . . . The universal bio‑psychological growth and community identity are essential components of high‑quality preschool and primary programs” (personal communication, 2022; emphasis mine).
But teachers’ embodiment of the relation‑based teaching model is undermined—becomes a half‑truth—for Bowman when teachers implicitly or explicitly demonstrate they do not value the family/community contexts of Black and Brown children and children from families with low incomes that influence their physical, psychosocial, and cognitive development—contexts that clash with White, Western, and middle‑class expectations of home and community life. Misunderstanding development in these contexts, she avowed, leads some teachers to question parents’ attachment to or their educational aspirations for their children (personal communication, 2022). This happens even at the infant and toddler level, when teachers’ preconceived ideas about parenting may lead to negative judgments of families who choose bottle feeding and parent‑regulated early toilet training. A lack of frequent book reading in the home across the early years is another common source of teacher criticism. Whether families’ choices are driven by personal preference, time, money, or cultural practice was of no consequence to Bowman. Families have their reasons, she maintained. The problem is when teacher biases destabilize families’ confidence in both their parenting and identity communities, making it more difficult for them to be supportive of their children’s education.
Exacerbating the gap between family/community contexts and relation‑based teaching is that expectations of parenting, teaching, and learning change with trends and times. One that Bowman (1990, 1998) predicted long before her contemporaries is the use and influence of technology on content area learning, particularly as children transition from early childhood to the upper grades. “The worldwide technological revolution has made school skills in math, technology, science, and formal language essential to all peoples. [O]ver time, the content of each of these subjects will be rethought and reorganized, and the basic outlines will increasingly be seen as the basic requirements of childhood everywhere.” Yet, Bowman pointed out, this does not mean that all families have the resources or skills to give children experience with technological games and other tools. Increasingly so, the role of technology in the home creates another possible disconnect between children’s personal lives and school expectations. Therefore, early schooling and curriculum must rise to meet this demand for all children (personal communication, 2022).
Finally, Bowman’s vision of a relation‑based teaching model included teachers helping children to actively treasure their home and community contexts—however distinct from the school’s context—while at the same time helping them meet school expectations. African American Vernacular English, or Black English, is a case in point (Bowman 1989a, 1991, 2019). “Children can learn to speak a school language that is different, whether their home language is Spanish, Urdu, Black English, or other,” she said forcefully (personal communication, 2022). Classroom management can be another site of contention between families’ and teachers’ beliefs. Along with other Black scholars (Irvine 1990; Ladson-Billings 1995), Bowman asserted that many Black children respond better to teachers’ use of a culturally relevant management style, in keeping with the concept of “warm demanders” (Irvine & Fraser 1998). That is, effective Black teachers of Black children manage children’s behavior through the timbre of their voice, clear directions, and insistence on performance (Irvine 1990; Cooper 2003). They also refrain from suggesting children have a choice to comply with school rules and routines when, in reality, they do not (“Go sit down” vs. “Will you please take your seat?” or “Put away your toys; it’s lunchtime” vs. “Would you like to put away your toys and go to lunch?”). To Bowman, Black children’s experience of a direct management style does not impede their higher‑order thinking skills. Nor does a similar style of social exchange impede their creativity, as exemplified across the Black community in its music, literature, and verbal expression, including slang (personal communication, 2022).
The Half-Truth of School Readiness
Don’t all children learn before they get to school? They are always learning.
—Barbara T. Bowman
The school readiness construct is the second principle of child development that Bowman argued gets translated as a half‑truth, to the detriment of Black and Brown children and children from families with low incomes. Here too, she said, predominant assumptions based on White, Western, and middle‑class norms are not sufficiently elastic to include all children’s academic profiles relative to their family/community contexts (personal communication, 2022; see also 1994). Exacerbating the problem is that school readiness is based on the pervasive and popular concept that young children must be “ready to learn” by the first day of kindergarten or they will not succeed in elementary school and later.
It is also useful to remember the history and research on school readiness, which is a term repeatedly employed over the decades, though its meaning has changed. For instance, Head Start in the 1960s concerned itself with getting children “ready” for kindergarten; now school districts and classroom teachers regularly talk about readiness for prekindergarten and even preschool. Additionally, families are now assessed for their readiness to support children’s readiness, as seen in the Office of Head Start’s definition of school readiness: “children are ready for school, families are ready to support their children’s learning, and schools are ready for children” (USDHHS 2022). Indeed, what it means to be ready to learn is ever evolving as the concept responds to biological, environmental, and social forces, as well as advances in understanding how children construct knowledge (Graue 1992). Ultimately, as noted in the previous section, productive learning experiences involve the biological child’s meaningful engagement with all environmental and social experiences, including in family/community contexts and in school.
Bowman did not question the idea that children go to school to learn many new things. But the long‑standing half‑truth of the school readiness construct is twofold. First is the underlying assumption that a state of unreadiness to learn is even humanly possible. “Don’t all children learn before they get to school? They are always learning” (emphasis hers). The fact is, however, they may not learn the way they are being taught. She challenged the idea that Black and Brown children and children from families with low incomes are not pre‑primed to learn in school (personal communication, 2022). Second, the school readiness construct is defined by White, Western, middle‑class paradigms about early learning that are not universally valued, such as children’s acquisition of an independent, agentive approach to learning. By contrast, many families and communities place more emphasis on mutuality and social involvement with others. Others do not have the resources to play an active role in cultivating academic skills or independent behavior. Trips to the library, attending family‑teacher conferences, providing healthy snacks, and other measures of family involvement are not realistic expectations of all families; however, this does not mean these families do not possess high educational aspirations for their children (Bowman 1992). They too send their children to school with the expectation—and hope—their children will not only learn more than they already know, but what schools specifically want them to know across the school day (personal communication, 2022; emphasis hers).
Teachers and schools must recognize that some of the usual expectations of prior skills and knowledge are unfamiliar to some groups of children. These run the gamut from the physical (sitting cross‑legged and still in circle; dressing oneself) to the social (working independently; no teasing), and from general knowledge (different kinds of animals; counting to 10) to specialized knowledge (names of geometric shapes; what astronauts do). Bowman also was alarmed by the way in which many early learning standards and standardized assessments suggest all children can and should be learning the same thing, at the same time, and in the same way based on their chronological age. The expectation hides gross inequities in the data: Obviously they do not, as suggested by the perennial achievement gap news. But to blame the children and their family/community contexts for failure to meet one-size-fits-all standards when they enter school is inexcusable in Bowman’s view. She argued, “What we need to do is to help lots of people understand the difference between development and education, that children can be developmentally competent and still fail in school because they don’t know the kinds of information that schools need them to know” (personal communication, 2022; NIEER 2023).
Implications for Teachers and Teacher Education
Bowman recognized that not all family or community contexts are able to support children’s healthy development relative to school expectations. Nor did she discount statistics that show adverse early childhood experiences are more commonly associated with Black and Brown children and children from families with low incomes (Shonkoff & Phillips 2000; Bowman et al. 2018; Bowman 2019). Mental and physical illness, temperament, and traumatic experiences can derail individual families, and war, epidemics, and famine can overstress particular communities. Yet Bowman was always stupefied by the failure of these investigations and reports to hold anyone except the families responsible for causal factors. “Such articles call attention away from demonstrated relationships between environment and school achievement and effective interventions,” she wrote, by not recognizing families need help (personal communication, 2022).
From Bowman’s perspective, there is no ideal family background or one-size-fits-all “best practice.” There is only the one needed for children to be personally and academically successful in a system that is not designed for historically marginalized children and families (personal communication, 2022). The more divergent their family/community context is from the “powerholder-society, the more difficult it is for children to achieve in school” (personal communication, 2022). Therefore, teachers—current and in preparation—need both the theoretical knowledge and pedagogical skills to help all children acquire the knowledge and skills across domains that are necessary for long‑term school and life success. She called for teachers to adopt a discerning and open attitude about development and education. She cautioned them strongly against being swayed by harmful “half‑truths” about family/community contexts and how children develop and learn. What children learn at home is what they bring to school, though they are developmentally always ready to learn more. Teachers must reflectively put aside their own biases and assumptions to implement practices that ensure all children are educated in ways that help them meet school expectations.
In the case of meaningful disconnects between family/community and school expectations, teachers should do their part in assisting families and children in acquiring the social, material, and educational resources they need to meet those expectations in an expedient fashion. When a family’s need goes well beyond what teachers can provide, system‑wide support must be available. Bowman was deeply concerned that many families need more help in supporting their young children’s early education than most educational systems provide. This may require inventive or creative solutions. (Changes to the length of the school day and year was one idea she championed.) “We need different structures,” she said. In the absence of whole‑scale reform of school schedules and formats, Bowman maintained schools and teachers must be the agents of direct support.
Bowman held an optimistic view of teachers’ abilities to grow as professionals, whatever their own background or preparation (1989b). In pursuit of becoming an equity‑minded practitioner, Bowman urged all teachers to reflectively “step back from personal issues” that might have a damaging influence on their ability to create “trustworthy,” “growth producing and self‑assuring” classroom environments (personal communication, 2022). She reminded them that memories of early schooling are always germane to the formation of our teaching dispositions, especially those caused by unkind or unsympathetic teachers, indifferent to our background knowledge and family stories. Teachers also need to reckon with any active or present biases against groups of people that could inhibit their fair and equitable teaching.
Bowman wrote, “The teaching‑learning paradigm is best understood by taking into account [a teacher’s] background as well as empirical knowledge.” This is the “subjective” side of teaching, which is not only inescapable but extremely critical to being an effective practitioner (Bowman 1989b, 444). (Relatedly, a similar model of teacher education can be found in the work of other multicultural and critical theorists, including Irvine [1990, 2018]; Ladson-Billings [1995, 2000], Banks & Banks [2015], and Gay [2018].)
In conclusion, the question Bowman asked teachers to ask over and over is “How do schools give what families don’t have [resources and the time] . . . and give kids what they need” (personal communication, 2022; emphasis hers).
About the Author
Patricia “Patsy” M. Cooper, PhD, is an associate professor of early childhood care and education at Queens College in the City University of New York, where she teaches courses in early childhood development, curriculum, and early literacy. Her research interests include early childhood teacher effectiveness, pedagogical fairness, LGBTQ+ parent families, and the work of Vivian Paley. patricia.cooper@qc.cuny.edu
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