By Barbara Henderson and Daniel R. Meier
Elevating the Voices of Practitioners
Editors’ Note
Twenty years ago, Voices of Practitioners was introduced to NAEYC members and to the field. The publication is an important part of NAEYC’s history: It has supported key facets of the organization’s mission, including elevating educators’ expertise and experiences and supporting their professional growth. It showcases key competencies of early childhood educators who “[e]ngage in continuous, collaborative learning to inform practice” and “[d]evelop and sustain the habit of reflective and intentional practice in their daily work with young children and as members of the early childhood profession” (NAEYC 2020, 25).
Throughout its history, Voices founders and editors have worked to establish and sustain its ethos: A commitment to nurturing authentic teacher research and ensuring that each piece is deeply human and uplifts the stories and insights of practitioners. In honor of NAEYC’s centennial, Barbara Henderson and Daniel R. Meier (who helped conceive of the project) and Andrew J. Stremmel (one of their first collaborators) reflect on the origins, evolution, and enduring significance of teacher research within the early childhood education field.
The story of Voices of Practitioners is one of people, partnerships, and core principles that shape its purpose. From the beginning, we understood that teacher research depended on creating conditions where teachers could write, publish, and be recognized as knowledge producers within their own profession. That conviction drew on the teacher-research movement (e.g., Cochran-Smith & Lytle 1993) and on the influence of an even wider range of scholars who had long argued that authentic inquiry about educating children must begin in early learning settings, not in universities.
In this edition of Voices of Practitioners, we reflect on the publication within the context of NAEYC’s 100th anniversary. We write from the shared perspective of educators who were dedicated to this approach when little attention was being given to teachers’ own research and reflections. We highlight how Voices has been and will continue to be a vehicle for documenting the wisdom of practice, honoring teacher inquiry as a form of scholarship, and sustaining a professional community committed to reflection, collaboration, and change.
Teacher Voice and Professional Learning Through Inquiry
Many years ago, I (Daniel) attended a weekend set of sessions sponsored by the Spencer Foundation in a rural area in Wisconsin. It was a beautiful setting, and the foundation had invited a wonderful variety of researchers, teacher educators, and teachers to present and discuss practitioner inquiry. I attended and presented with two preschool teachers with whom I had worked on a small grant to promote teacher inquiry in their early childhood settings.
After we presented, Courtney Cazden (Charles William Eliot Professor of Education Emerita at Harvard University) addressed the group with some reflections. Holding her customary yellow legal pad scribbled with notes, Cazden offered her usual insightful reflections on our presentation and the value of practitioner inquiry for early childhood education. One of the main points she made is that practitioner inquiry should primarily occur outside the academy and beyond the direction and purview of college-sponsored projects and grants. For teacher inquiry to flourish, Cazden argued, it must be a grassroots effort, initiated and guided by teachers themselves in the field.
For early childhood practitioner inquiry to flourish and succeed, educators must see themselves as authors and writers and contribute to the inquiry knowledge base from a vantage point of experience, knowledge, and passion. In this sense, the critical need to support teachers as writers and authors is a foundational way to grow and preserve inquiry as grounded in classrooms, schools, and other early childhood settings. As writers and authors, practitioners add new levels of professional identity and gain an expanded toolbox of approaches to deepen their commitment to the field and expand their pedagogical and leadership expertise. Further, as a grassroots movement, practitioner inquiry has the potential to bring the voices and stories of educators of color to widen and improve practitioner knowledge beyond the still largely White space of the academy and professional publications (Baker 2020; Henderson et al. 2023).
Over the years, we have witnessed in Voices of Practitioners how early childhood educators have taken up critical topics and issues from their work and turned them into dynamic and evocative inquiry stories. These writers and authors have extended what they learned in their own journeys and composed inquiry stories for outside audiences. In doing so, they help to professionalize the field and inspire other educators to envision new possibilities for themselves.
As an avenue for supporting and widely sharing educators’ inquiries, Voices has thus served as an invaluable repository and testament to early childhood educators’ work. Next, we reflect on two of the published stories that showcase the professional power of teachers writing about their own inquiries.
Integrating Community, Culture, and Family into Teacher Inquiry
In “Finding Our Voices through Narrative Inquiry: Exploring a Conflict of Cultures,” Renetta Goeson (2014) writes poignantly about the history of her community and lineage, the Dakota people. Relying on her own narratives, journal entries, historical visuals such as maps, intergenerational family photographs, and her original artwork, Goeson recounts the cultural, communal, and educational strengths of her family and community as the foundation for her teaching and leadership work with Head Start children, families, and educators.
Goeson’s story interweaves historical events of oppression and genocide against Native peoples with the assets and strengths of her family’s story and her own childhood memories.
I attended Head Start as a child, on the reservation where I would later teach. The image of “school” spilled into my early childhood education at Head Start. The teachers there were themselves students of the boarding schools.
As I look back on the program’s outdoor environment, or what was commonly called the “playground,” it felt confining/inhibiting and artificial in contrast to the openness, freedom, and interesting challenges I have experienced in the natural environment. . . . [T]he memories that stay with me the most into adulthood are the rich experiences of the day as I freely explored the natural environment: the senses I recall, the warmth of the air, the feeling of the grass beneath me, the aroma of the honeysuckle and sage, the power of the beautiful environment, and the sacred bond of learning with my childhood friends and relatives. (14)
Goeson’s earlier work with narrative inquiry at South Dakota State University, under the mentorship of Andy Stremmel, provided an inquiry frame for her reflective and historical story. It supported Goeson to ask the simple yet deep question “What does it mean to educate young children within my culture?” (2014, 16). As a trainer and technical assistance provider for Region VI-American Indian and Alaska Native Head Start Programs, Goeson’s story provided a new frame and way forward for reconceptualizing Head Start programs to integrate Dakota community and family traditions and practices. In turn, Goeson’s article offers other practitioners one possible pathway for creating an arts-based approach that melds writing, art, and photographs into an evocative inquiry story. It stands as an example of what comes to fruition from an early childhood professional committed to inquiry, reflection, collaboration, and change.
Supporting Educators’ and Children’s Critical Consciousness
A more recent example is “Discovering the Brilliance and Beauty in Black,” by Patricia Sullivan (2020b), which was adapted from a chapter she contributed to a book focused on nature education (2020a). The article recounts a story from Baby Steps Nature School, a family child care program that Sullivan owned and taught in for many years. Sullivan, an experienced African American early childhood educator, focuses on an interaction with one child that she turns into an engaging inquiry story that examines colorism and racial bias. Her careful reflection and actions offer insights for supporting children’s critical consciousness regarding biases and stereotypes at the intersection of color, race, and development. Sullivan uses the power of story to analyze and reflect upon the teaching and learning implications of this engaging narrative.
Like all good storytellers, Sullivan entices readers into the collaborative inquiry with the children and her co-teachers with spare text and dialogue:
“Let’s go feed the squirrels,” I say just after seven in the morning, leading David (3 years old) to the back door and the shelves where we keep the wild animal food. David doesn’t like to be the first child to arrive at school: he anxiously watches the door and waits for his friends . . . to arrive. To distract him every morning, we feed the feral cats, the birds, and the squirrels . . . David likes Steller’s Jays because they have cool mohawks and blue eyebrows. The jays sometimes watch us from the tree and mimic a hawk’s call to scare away the squirrels from the nuts. When actual hawks appear, the jays dash for the trees, warning everyone in earshot of the danger. As we watch them now, suddenly all of the jays fly away, and David and I stare through the glass at the branches above the deck rail, watching as a chicken-size crow lands silently. “Oh no!” David says, dread and worry spreading across his face. “That’s not a good bird!” He freezes, alarmed but clearly eager to run outside and save the squirrels, who are still eating, oblivious to the danger. “Why do you think that’s a bad bird?” I ask. “Because it’s black,” David replies. (2020b, 55–56)
David’s comment prompts Sullivan to embark on a project focused on her initial question posed to the children and teachers, “Are crows bad because they are black?” (56). The ensuing journey with her children and colleagues involves Sullivan’s efforts to read and reread texts on the historical depiction of crows in literature and the media, which ranged from Grimm’s Fairy Tales to The Wizard of Oz to Dumbo. Acknowledging David’s Samoan heritage and the “many shades of brown” in his family (57) along with her own identity and history, Sullivan critically examines David’s developmental understanding and “decisions about color and meaning that could possibly shape his feelings about himself, other people, and the world for the rest of his life” (57).
Sullivan and her co-teachers then design arts-based projects for the children to explore selecting and using colors on their own and with peers. Reflecting on these activities, the teaching team realizes that the initial inquiry question has morphed into an even more local question, “How do we use colors in our school, and are we contributing to color bias?” (58), which upon continued collaborative reflection becomes even more specific and contextualized: “What do we like, and what color is it?” (59). This inquiry-question-as-reduction process prompts the team to return with the children to watching the crows in the morning; in essence, returning to the beginning of their journey.
For the next few weeks, the children and the teachers watch with special interest from the classroom windows as the crows eat with other birds and squirrels.
“He brought his family!” David says excitedly. There are five or six crows now eating our nuts. We watch as they take turns eating the nuts, one always sitting on the branches as a sentry to keep the others safe. There is a lot of squawking and screeching as the crows communicate with each other, and I worry the neighbors might complain about our project. After the crows leave, we notice that the crows didn’t eat all the nuts, leaving a few behind for the grateful jays. In circle time, we talk about our observations, and the children are happy that the crow left to get his family. They comment on how it was nice of the crow to bring the others to enjoy the nuts rather than keeping them all to himself. I follow up these sentiments with the question of focus: are crows really bad birds? The children are still unsure. Finally, I ask, “Would we like crows better if they were white?” (59).
This new question moves their inquiry in even more expanded directions as Sullivan and her co-teachers bring in an assortment of nonfiction and fiction books about crows, offer new arts-based activities about crows, and take local nature walks to learn more about the daily life of crows in the local park. Sullivan acknowledges that their inquiry work around color is a starting point in the long-term journey for children and adults to “destigmatiz[e] negative perceptions of color” and engage in “opportunities to identify assumptions, misunderstandings, and unrealized biases” (61).
Sullivan’s story constitutes a critical first step to address historical systems of exclusion and oppression of children and families from racially marginalized communities. Tragically, Pat Sullivan passed away in June 2025. She was a fierce advocate for supporting African American children, families, and educators in early childhood education and a talented inquirer and writer whose voice and talents will be deeply missed. Yet her stories live on—continuing to teach, inspire, and guide others in the ongoing work for justice and belonging.
Supporting, Sharing, and Sustaining Teacher Inquiry
By showcasing the inquiry stories of Goeson, Sullivan, and other talented practitioner inquirers, Voices of Practitioners has provided a forum for these educators to share their personal, communal, and professional talents with a larger audience. However, this collection also shows that making one’s inquiry public is not enough. The inquiry must address critical elements of human identity and learning for children and adults, and it must be rendered through well-told stories, cogent reflections, and meaningful implications for teaching and learning. These key factors sustain teacher inquiry and teacher research as living practices that nurture understanding, belonging, and joy for children and the educators who learn alongside them, as illustrated in the reflection below.
A Way of Knowing, A Way of Transforming Practice
Teaching That Is Grounded in Inquiry
By Andrew J. Stremmel
The stories highlighted in this article underscore that teacher research must stem from and remain grounded in classrooms, communities, and the complex identities teachers bring to their work. Teacher researchers take ownership of their backgrounds and experiences, following children into investigations that uncover questions of equity, belonging, power, development, and learning.
Building on this vision of teacher research as a relational and equitable practice, I offer a reflection that explores how narrative inquiry deepens teachers’ understanding of what it means to know, to teach, and to learn.
I believe that the first and immediate goal is to help teachers get better at what they do. The second aim is for teachers to gain a better understanding of themselves as teachers, their children as learners, and the context in which teaching and learning are immersed. This better understanding is in some ways comparable to the generation of knowledge. But the knowledge a teacher creates is located spatially and temporally, and it can be shared with others as stories or other forms of narrative.
Bruner (1986) notes that telling stories (narratives) is one of the most important features of teaching, and it is a valid and important way to share knowledge. Teachers engaged in narrative inquiry regularly write and author stories to describe the events of their settings and, more importantly, to interpret, make sense of, and address the issues and problems they encounter there. This narrative way of knowing creates storied understandings that cannot be captured via traditional research, which some have argued pursues the wrong questions and offers unusable answers to teachers who want to understand and improve their practice (Stremmel 2002; Cochran-Smith & Lytle 2009).
One of my favorite stories, “The Toads: Refocusing the Lens,” was written by Amanda Jo Messer (2020). It demonstrates how narrative inquiry was used to study a problem that existing research cannot easily address. The teacher creates new knowledge about teaching and learning from the direct study of her work in the classroom. Messer uses a narrative landscape to explore and find meaning in children’s ideas concerning the death and resurrection of toads. In doing so, she learns about young children’s ability to care, to have faith, and to take seriously the concept of death. From my personal observations having been a teacher of young children, this is a topic that adults shy away from addressing with children (Olin & Wilcox-Herzog 2020). Messer demonstrates an ability to listen, be respectful, and honor what the children have to say. She also shows pedagogical thoughtfulness by asking the right questions at the right time, pondering children’s responses, and negotiating a solution to address an issue of importance to them.
This kind of teacher inquiry validates a more comprehensive and accurate view of what it means to be a teacher. It places direct emphasis on what it means to teach, as opposed to the technical aspects of teaching. It enables teachers to better understand and interpret their own teaching in context; to systematically study and critically reflect on their attitudes, thoughts, and feelings; and be more responsive to children and the demands of the classroom. In this way, knowledge of teaching and learning originates in teaching that is grounded in inquiry (Stenhouse 1975).
About the Author
Andrew J. Stremmel, PhD, is professor emeritus in the School of Education, Counseling, and Human Development in the College of Education and Human Sciences at South Dakota State University.
Evolution, Continuity, and Vision for Future Teacher Research
Reflecting on the intellectual and pedagogical heart of teacher research and Voices of Practitioners, we are struck by elements that connect this body of work: Teacher research is grounded in the real lives of educators, children, programs and schools, and communities, and the act of studying one’s own practice generates understanding that is both personal and shareable. Indeed, teacher-led inquiry is a source of renewal for the field and a record of teachers’ evolving understandings of themselves, their students, and their work.
We are also struck by the continuity in what practitioners choose to examine, which falls into three themes:
Relationship and rapport: Teachers write about the daily, often subtle work of building trust with children and families. They explore how empathy, listening, and shared joy sustain learning. They show how a critical inquiry stance allows them to do a better job as they work with children and families with many different backgrounds, assets, and beliefs.
Inquiry itself: Educators document their practice and use reflection to deepen their understanding of children’s thinking, primarily as it unfolds in the curriculum and learning environments.
Collaboration: Authors describe the power of shared reflection in study groups, staff meetings, and mentoring circles that support teacher researchers. Within this thread, directors and program leaders also write about creating time, space, and structures that make teacher collaboration through inquiry possible.
While these central topics have remained remarkably steady, the genres and formats have evolved. Many of the earliest Voices articles followed a more traditional research report structure (literature review, methods section) to situate the work within established research conventions. Yet we always encouraged authors to draw readers into the lived texture of their settings and let the stories guide analysis.
The model for this narrative approach was seeded back in 2004 in an article we wrote with Gail Perry in the March issue of Young Children (Henderson et al. 2004). We introduced the concept of teacher research and featured excerpts from Isauro Escamilla’s classroom inquiry to illustrate how a teacher’s close observation and reflection could become a source of professional knowledge. In this work, Escamilla documented children’s discovery of snails outdoors and their fascination with the creatures’ movements and the shadows they cast in the sunlight. The inquiry expanded to consider the children as they drew their own portraits, showing how close observation could uncover children’s questions, theories, and ways of representing their discoveries. The imagery of snails and shadows invited readers into the classroom in ways that felt analytical yet deeply human.
Other early pieces extended that story-forward approach, including “ ‘Do You Want to See Something Goofy?’ Peer Culture in the Preschool Yard” by Aaron Neimark (2012) and “Exploring the Forest: Wild Places in Childhood” by Anna Golden (2012) as well as Goeson’s and Sullivan’s pieces highlighted earlier. Indeed, their work foreshadowed the narratives that have since appeared in Voices. In 2020 we began to formally invite and shepherd shorter, narrative-focused articles anchored in a real-life anecdote and connected to a yearly theme. We call these pedagogical narratives (Henderson et al. 2024; Henderson 2025). Through this process, we have now featured the voices of more than 30 new contributors.
This evolution highlights Voices of Practitioners’ past and future—supporting and amplifying educators who explore relationships, curiosities, collaboration, and changes in practice by linking everyday moments to broader questions of equitable, joyful teaching and learning. Our vision is to preserve the history of teacher research, to ensure that teachers’ voices remain visible and influential, and to advocate for continuing to improve and refine our understanding of and responses to how all children think, create, connect, grow, and learn.
Acknowledgment
NAEYC members can explore past Voices of Practitioners columns via the Young Children archive. (Visit NAEYC.org/resources/pubs/yc/archive, and select the link on this page for the digital archive.) The recent compilations of Voices articles can be accessed at NAEYC.org/resources/pubs/vop and through digital library subscriptions.
About the Authors
Barbara Henderson, PhD, is the director of the doctoral program in educational leadership at San Francisco State University and a professor in elementary education with an early childhood specialization. Her research expertise is in practitioner and teacher research. She is one of the founding editors of Voices of Practitioners.
Daniel R. Meier, PhD, teaches early childhood at San Francisco State University. His research focuses on early literacy, teacher inquiry, international education, and children’s play. dmeier@sfsu.edu
Voices of Practitioners
Voices of Practitioners is devoted to teacher research in early childhood education. It appears as a regular column in Young Children. Visit the Young Children archive as well as NAEYC.org/resources/pubs/vop to peruse an archive of Voices articles.
References
Baker, M. 2020. “Promoting Equity Through Teacher Research.” Young Children 75 (2): 58–65.
Bruner, J. 1986. Actual Minds, Possible Worlds. Harvard University Press.
Cochran-Smith, M., & S.L. Lytle. 1993. Inside/Outside: Teacher Research and Knowledge. Teachers College Press.
Cochran-Smith, M., & S.L. Lytle. 2009. Inquiry as Stance: Practitioner Research for the Next Generation. Teachers College Press.
Goeson, R. 2014. “Finding Our Voices Through Narrative Inquiry: Exploring a Conflict of Cultures.” Voices of Practitioners 9 (1): 2–22.
Golden, A. 2012. “Exploring the Forest: Wild Places in Childhood.” Voices of Practitioners 7 (1): 16–19.
Henderson, B. 2025. “The Pedagogical Narrative as a Form of Teacher Research: Stories for Inquiry, Reflection, and Transformation.” Young Children 80 (2): 66–74.
Henderson, B., R. Brookshire, R. Grady, I.M. Escamilla, A. Aquilizan, et al. 2024. “The Pedagogical Narrative as a Form of Teacher Research.” Voices of Practitioners 19. naeyc.org/resources/pubs/vop/dec2024/intro.
Henderson, B., I.M. Escamilla, M. Baker, A. Branscombe, M. Donaldson, et al. 2023. “Introduction: Using Identity Narratives to Inform ECE Practice.” Voices of Practitioners 18 (1). naeyc.org/resources/pubs/vop/dec2023/intro.
Henderson, B., D. Meier, & G. Perry. 2004. “Voices of Practitioners: Teacher Research in Early Childhood Education.” Young Children 59 (2): 94–100.
Messer, A.J. 2020. “The Toads: Refocusing the Lens.” Voices of Practitioners 15. naeyc.org/resources/pubs/yc/dec2020/toads-refocusing-lens.
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Neimark, A. 2012. “ ‘Do You Want to See Something Goofy?’ Peer Culture in the Preschool Yard.” In Our Inquiry, Our Practice: Undertaking, Supporting, and Learning from Early Childhood Teacher Research(ers), eds. G. Perry, B. Henderson, & D.R. Meier. NAEYC.
Olin, T., & A. Wilcox-Herzog. 2020. “Discussing Death with Young Children.” ZERO TO THREE. zerotothree.org/resource/discussing-death-with-young-children.
Perry, G., B. Henderson, & D.R. Meier. 2012. Our Inquiry, Our Practice: Undertaking, Supporting, and Learning from Early Childhood Teacher Research(ers). NAEYC.
Stenhouse, L. 1975. An Introduction to Curriculum Research and Development. Heinemann Educational Books.
Stremmel, A.J. 2002. “Teacher Research: Nurturing Professional and Personal Growth Through Inquiry.” Young Children 57 (5): 62–70.
Sullivan, P. 2020a. “Discovering the Brilliance and Beauty in Black.” In Nature Education in Early Childhood Education: Integrating Inquiry and Practice, eds. D.R. Meier & S. Sisk-Hilton. 2nd ed. Routledge.
Sullivan, P. 2020b. “Discovering the Brilliance and Beauty in Black.” Young Children 75 (4): 54–61.
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