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
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