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.
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