Power Play: Explorando y empujando fronteras en una escuela en Tejas through a multilingual play-based early learning curriculum(4 Childhood Studies)

Power Play tells the story of activist teachers and the very young together in a play-based curriculum in a public school in Texas. The authors narrate (with playful interruptions) a curriculum that is powered by the students’ lived encounters—the languages, landscapes, beliefs, histories, geographies, politics, economies, ideas, people, things, matter, and matters of fact and fiction that students carry with them to school, that carry them to school, through school, through their lives.

Table of Contents:
Gaile S. Cannella: Foreword – Acknowledgments – Beginnings – Explorando – Empujando – El Juego Conmueve.

About the Author :
Tim Kinard is Associate Professor of Early Learning at Texas State University. Jesse Gainer is Associate Professor of Literacy Education at Texas State University. Mary Esther Soto Huerta is Associate Professor of Culture, Literacy, and Language at Texas State University.

Review :
“The authors offer a refreshing, critically grounded book that pushes the multiple boundaries and fronteras that children, teachers, and la comunidad cross and transform every day. Through the power of storytelling and the varied critical scholarship presented, childhood education in Tejas can be experienced as a ‘trans-dimensional co-existence’ for bilingual, bicultural children in Tejas and beyond—a necessary re-imagination. It is a must read for anyone interested in the nuevas posibilidades within contemporary critical childhood studies.”—CINTHYA M. SAAVEDRA, THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS RIO GRANDE VALLEY “The storytelling text found in this unique book—and more importantly, the critical, relational pedagogical perspectives and emergent actions that are demonstrated on the ground with young children—are urgently needed. Critical educational methodologies that would value the diversities within and all around us, as well as lead to increased justice and equity, are an absolute necessity. I visited the program in the summer of 2017 and was inspired by the perspectives, actions, and agendas of the children, their diverse teachers (both in-service and pre-service), and the activist researcher authors of this volume, who also work as children’s teachers in the program.”—FROM THE FOREWORD BY GAILE S. CANNELLA “We need this book. It leaves no question about the need to dismantle the stronghold of colonized myths about language, play, risk, readiness, and childhood as the authors draw us artfully and eloquently into children’s worlds. With love and concern for children most misrepresented as well as for those who learn bias through those misrepresentations, they urge us to resist and replace dominant deficit ideologies to create spaces of justice for children today so that they are poised to contribute to a more just society tomorrow.”—SUSI LONG, UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA