Connecting the Dots: Nurturing Empathy and Ethical Teaching in Early Education with Dr. Cara Furman

Join us on a transformative journey with Dr. Cara Furman as we delve into the heart of early childhood education, exploring how empathy and ethics shape young minds.

In this episode, Dr. Diane discusses the profound impact of connecting the dots between empathy and engaged learning with Dr. Cara Furman, a leading figure in early education and teaching from an ethical center. We explore how educators can maintain their core values in dynamic classroom environments through practical wisdom and empathy. With thematic curriculum integration and the power of diverse children's literature, we highlight innovative approaches to crafting meaningful learning experiences. Dr. Furman's insights promise to inspire educators to nurture environments where empathy, understanding, and learners thrive.

Chapters:

(0:00:03) - Teaching Ethically in Early Childhood 

Discover how Dr. Cara Furman advocates for teaching from an ethical center, emphasizing adaptability and practical wisdom in navigating classroom challenges.

(0:12:51) - Integrating Curriculum Through Literature and Movement 

Explore the innovative integration of thematic curriculum with literature and movement, featuring engaging projects like puppet shows and folktales.

(0:20:17) - Using Books as Windows and Mirror for Personal Connection 

Uncover the transformative power of children's literature as tools for empathy, with insights into selecting books that serve as mirrors and windows for students.

(0:26:54) - Navigating Diverse Themes in Children's Literature 

Examine the challenges of finding diverse children's literature and the importance of avoiding stereotypes while enriching understanding.

(0:42:25) - Building Spaces for Hope 

Reflect on the theme of hope and the small moments of connection that bring value to our world.

Links:

• Learn more about Dr. Cara Furman
• Listen to Dr. Furman's Podcasts: Thinking in the Midst and Teaching from an Ethical Center 
• Books by Dr. Furman: Descriptive Inquiry in Teacher Practice: Cultivating Practical Wisdom to Create Democratic Schools and Teaching from an Ethical Center

Join us as we celebrate the transformative power of teaching and literature in creating compassionate and ethically grounded learning environments.

Transcript

00:02 - Dr Diane Jackson Schnoor (Host)
Welcome to today's episode of the Adventures in Learning podcast. I am so excited to welcome Dr Cara Furman to the show. She is an expert in how we teach from an ethical center when we're talking about early childhood and she's also an amazing resource for early childhood literacy. I am a huge fan of her work. She has her own podcast and she's written multiple books which I'm going to drop links to in the show notes. Cara, welcome to the show. 

00:30 - Dr Cara Furman (Guest)
Thank you. It's really great to be here. I'm really excited to talk to you. 

00:34 - Dr Diane Jackson Schnoor (Host)
So I love what you do, but I'm thinking maybe for those who are listening, who just popped into the conversation, can you define a little bit about what it means to work from an ethical center when you're working with young people? 

00:48 - Dr Cara Furman (Guest)
Yeah. So my son is getting swim lessons right now and I so I've been thinking a lot about like how you stay afloat and how you kind of calibrate yourself in the water and how you sort of keep bobbing back up. And I think that that's probably the metaphor that I would use for teaching from an ethical center, is that you're trying to make your way through the challenges of teaching and you're trying to kind of not just stay afloat but you're trying to be able to work around whatever comes your way. So an example of that I was just thinking about was I was writing about this this morning a child who I was working with many years ago, who often got into fights with children. He had gotten into a fight with a classmate a verbal fight and run off and he had climbed up the climbing structure and it was time to get him inside and I was covering recess at that moment and I remember sort of following him at some point, standing at the bottom of the structure trying to talk up at him, which wasn't working, feeling a lot of pressure that I had to get him inside and there was other things that were supposed to be happening and at some moment in this exchange, I just stopped talking and I climbed up the structure and I don't think I said anything to him when I got to the top, except maybe high. But he seemed sort of surprised when I got up there and I just sat with him and eventually we talked and eventually he came back down. 

02:23
And I think of that, as you know, one of the countless. It happens every single day. These moments in teaching when you it's high stakes. I needed to figure out a way to get him and me safely back into the room. I didn't want him to push me when I got up there, which could have happened and there's not really a clear way forward. And so what you draw on as a teacher in those moments is your aptitude, your capabilities. In that case I was physically able to climb Things that you know work well, sitting along beside children, things you know don't work well, shouting across a wide space at them. You know all of those things come into play in these split second decisions and then again to keep thinking about how you stay afloat in water. It's a constant effort. So once he came back down, there was more decisions to be made. It wasn't like, oh, okay, now we're like done for the day and everything is smooth that I can go back to relying on, you know, memorization or something like that. 

03:23 - Dr Diane Jackson Schnoor (Host)
You know, and I was talking to a couple of teachers that were in my course this past semester and we were talking about the need to take improv in your like. It would be really lovely if our education programs gave you the skills to be able to improv and think on your feet, because that's not something that comes intuitively to people. It can be a very scary thing when you think about okay, I'm in this situation, how do I make this decision on the fly when there are 25 other kids also vying for my attention? How do you help prepare educators to be able to make these decisions that are balanced ethically in terms of dealing with the child who might be in crisis or having an issue at the moment, but also serving yourself and serving the other students? 

04:13 - Dr Cara Furman (Guest)
That's such a great question. So I frame my thinking around. It's an Aristotelian concept, but it's practical wisdom and that is very loosely translated as knowing the right way to do things, kind of in the right way at the right moment. And again, this is a loose sort of modernized translation of Aristotle. But the idea is that you have a core set of values and then you have a set of things that you know. It could be developmental things you know about children, it could be children's literature, it could be how to teach reading or all of those things, not just it could be. And then it's being able to think in the moment and apply it in context. 

05:03
So, teaching teachers, I first do a lot on content. So when I teach K2 literacy, we practice and rehearse and play and study some more and look up examples of all the phonics rules as just one example, so that they really know that stuff inside and out. We read a ton of picture books and so they're fluent in that area, but we also spend a lot of time learning how to be more aware of our environment, and so some of that is not directly related to the classroom. I have them do an activity that I a lot of people do this activity, but I learned about it from a colleague of mine named Patty Bailey. We do sound mapping where we go outside and we listen to all the sounds we hear and we become aware of what's kind of going on around us. I do an activity often and this one I took from Carol Rogers though again people do this in different ways where you choose an item, I like to do acorns or rocks that look basically the same and the students have to study their item for a period of time and really observe it closely. And then I take the item from them and they have to get their item back, and they're always able to do that, even when it's with acorns and things that really superficially look very much the same. 

06:34
And then in most of my classes we do a child study, so they spend a lot of time taking that ability to pay close attention and they apply it to children and just to give a little bit more information. This is not a review of how the child is meeting specific developmental domains. It's a study of who they are as a person, and so I always say it doesn't really matter to me in this case that they walked into the room or that they sat down, but how they walked into the room and how they sat down is going to help me. And then they take kind of everything that they've learned from the child study. They think about the content they've been learning about, say, literacy, and they come up with activities that would support that child as opposed to someone else's focused child. So those are some strategies I think I'll also add in. 

07:35
An activity that I often have students do is I will informally assign them to spend the week stopping and not intervening. 

07:47
So many times my students are either teaching or they're in student teaching environments and I ask them to, you know, intervene if a kid's about to run out into traffic. 

07:59
Obviously, but really pause for a second and think about. You know, in this fight between these two children, do I really need to intervene or might they have be able to take a moment and sort it out themselves? Um, before while the kid is sounding out this word, do I need to jump right in or could I sit quietly for a few more seconds and just pausing and practicing that? The students will often say, yeah, sometimes I still had to step in in the end, but often I did not have to step in Because, as it turns out, when I stayed quiet for 10 more seconds, the kids figured out the word, or they figured out how to resolve the fight, and that also, the pause, helped them have a better sense of how they might intervene once they stepped in too. So there's many, many ways, I think, to build these habits of being able to be attuned to your environment, but those are just some of the core ones that I go to. 

08:55 - Dr Diane Jackson Schnoor (Host)
Well, I love those, and the art of the pause is one worth remembering because that serves us, no matter whether we're dealing with children or dealing with other adults and situations as well. Often, just taking that moment to be present and let it play out makes a huge difference. Absolutely, yep. So talk a little bit more about the work that you do. I know that you teach K-2 literacy at Hunter College. Can you talk about how you bring this work with ethics? Talk a little more deeply about how you connect the two. 

09:30 - Dr Cara Furman (Guest)
Yeah, thank you. So I was a classroom teacher. I taught first and second grade and then I was a support teacher, working with children and their teachers when kids were struggling, kind of broadly defined in the school. And so I got to work with everybody, pre-k through fifth grade in that job and I did things like I led reading groups for kids who were not actually really struggling but they were, you know, bored in their class for this reason or that reason, and I worked with children who were really struggling behaviorally, like the one I described at the beginning of our talk today, behaviorally like the one I described at the beginning of our talk today. And where am I going with that? So that's my background. 

10:16
And then I got a degree in philosophy of education and the reason why I did that is because, at the end of the day, it was the really big questions about what is right and what should we be doing in school and why does it matter. Those were the kinds of questions that drew me, and even one of the things that I enjoy about your podcast is that the questions that you ask the authors often about their books. They're really about, well, what is the philosophy and the meaning behind this text. So that's my background is really truly as a teacher and as a philosopher, and I often put a hyphen between the two and what I actually do. 

10:58
I almost never teach philosophy classes or ethics classes. Occasionally I have colleagues who get to teach those and that seems really fun, but I teach mostly methods classes, or I teach our research methods classes, or I teach an intro to education class. Those are sort of the staples that I have, and what I love about that is that I think that if philosophy is going to matter, it has to matter in our everyday interactions and it has to just be part of what we do. So I actually really appreciate not having a standalone philosophy class, because I want the teachers to be asking these philosophical questions in the midst of their very busy curriculum, and so I think that I get to teach them that by modeling it in the midst of our very busy curriculum. 

11:52 - Dr Diane Jackson Schnoor (Host)
Oh, I really like that. So let's dive a little bit more deeply into some of the links that we can make between picture books and K2 literacy, because I know, like me, you have a passion for the picture books. How can we help teachers? Because I know one of the things I've heard going around the country is I don't have time to read aloud. That's like my single most. I hear that and I want to bang my head against the wall because I'm like no there's always time to read aloud and there's always time to build in the engagement. 

12:22
So how do you help teachers learn how to use picture books effectively? 

12:28 - Dr Cara Furman (Guest)
Yeah, I think that's really important. I am always thinking about what my big picture is and how to integrate things and how to kind of double dip. 

12:43
So, I'm going to kind of answer your question by going in a slightly different direction. So I taught at a school where we had what we called core and this was an integrated curriculum, that it met the science and social studies standards, essentially for the city, and we chose it thematically. So we did bridges some years and we did the East River, which was where we were teaching other years. So it was rivers and bridges. Basically was this sort of two year curriculum and then it was architecture was one of the focuses and I'm blanking on another one of the focuses and I'm blanking on another one of the focuses. But I decided when we were doing the East River curriculum to focus it around folktales and the kids were studying a river animal and we were reading a lot of what we were calling how the world came to be books, books where there's sort of a punchline to them, and they were learning about the river and they were learning about the environment and it was a huge project and it culminated in the kids writing their own puppet shows and they made puppets in art class and they performed the puppet shows and they decorated the classroom and it was a big activity towards the end of the school year and the way that we were able to do this while doing all the other traditional things that we had to do was I overlapped as much as I possibly could. So there's a lot of brilliant children's books that we can read, and we read all kinds of books, but often when I was looking for an example of how to teach a particular writing skill, I would choose it from how the World Came to Be book. That was just one example. 

14:39
Some things we couldn't teach overlapping at all, like two digit addition, like it just didn't make sense. But other parts of our science curriculum we could teach through this. So we did transects, for example, where we studied all the things that we could find in a square that we made in and we were looking in Tompkins Square Park at that time. We didn't find a lot of wildlife, but we were. We were learning these kinds of skills by by by. We were able to, and then we counted up and we tallied what we found in the transect. 

15:10
So that was our kind of math curriculum, was double dipping. We started that curriculum on day one of the school year. Like the first read aloud that I read was this book, a Story. A Story which is about how stories came into the world. It's a retelling of a folk tale of a folk tale, and then we just whenever we had a kind of a spare moment, we would keep going at it, and so that doesn't answer your question exactly about how we bring in children's literature specifically. But I think, whatever we're doing with our curriculum, if we're really intentional and we know what we're trying to accomplish, we can double dip in a lot of different places and make sure that we are taking the time for the things that matter the most. 

15:53 - Dr Diane Jackson Schnoor (Host)
And I do think that answers where I was going with that, because there is an intentionality that goes into how do we bring these books into what we're doing, how do we build these hands-on experiences? 

16:05
And when we can cross-pollinate and connect things in a meaningful way, the kids get more out of it, we get more out of it. There's more joy in the teaching, and one of the things I know I've told my own students is you don't have to start doing everything at once. Yeah, you know, pick one thing and really focus and make it intentional that first year and then you've got that, you've figured out how to do that. So the next year add another one in, and so you're building your repertoire by being intentional and figuring out okay, with the East River, I now have things that I can do and I'm prepared to be surprised and add new things in. Let's look at what we can do for bridges next, and so you're building on it and you're figuring out ways and don't do it alone. I mean that's. The other piece is, if you've got team members and there are other members of your grade, talk to them, share ideas, because I think that you're stronger when you collaborate and share good ideas. 

17:04 - Dr Cara Furman (Guest)
I love that. I also, as you were talking, I was thinking too, were talking. I was thinking too. 

17:14
I didn't do a lot of movement breaks, which I know are popular now in schools and children absolutely need to move and they need breaks. 

17:20
But what I did do is I had a cleanup song and I thought of what you were saying, because it's doing one thing and doing something that you like. 

17:29
So the cleanup song I had was here Comes the Sun by the Beatles, which is about four minutes, and it takes about four minutes to clean up the classroom sometimes, and so there wasn't an official movement break, but after every single activity I would turn on the cleanup song, and some activities really took the full amount of time for them to clean up and be on the rug. Occasionally an activity took even even longer, and we dealt with that. But a lot of activities didn't take that long, and so the kids would clean, or they would quickly, and then they would come and they would talk to each other on the rug, and you know, similarly, we often did read alouds, where the kids would act out the story that they were reading too, and so they didn't need to watch a video to move their bodies, because the movement was being sort of brought into the curriculum in all kinds of different ways. So that was another place where I saved a lot of time, I suppose. 

18:24 - Dr Diane Jackson Schnoor (Host)
No, absolutely. Do you have favorite picture books that you like to work with when you're working with your students or you're working with younger children? 

18:34 - Dr Cara Furman (Guest)
Yeah, absolutely so. One book that I always bring in at this point is either and make sure I get the title right, maybe you can help me A Big Bed for Little Snow and what is the Little Star book. 

19:02 - Dr Diane Jackson Schnoor (Host)
Oh, A Big Mooncake for Little Star. I have both of those, Grace Lin yes, so those are Grace Lin. 

19:08 - Dr Cara Furman (Guest)
I was introduced to Grace Lin by a student who um said that the books had been really meaningful for her growing up. She was a Asian student, growing up in a very white area and so these books had kind of given her um a mirror, essentially, and so she introduced me to the author and I love those two books because they the pictures are beautiful, they're really engaging, they're just the right length for children to get interested in and they really encourage movement, which might be scary for teachers, but like whenever you read it to children. You know, I read it to my son's first grade class last year and the kids were like starting to like it was a big bed for little snow. They were like you could see their bodies, kind of like jumping along with it. They love it. And in both cases the parent is kind of watching, essentially like a misbehavior. That's not really a problem with. Kind of watching essentially like a misbehavior, that's not really a problem with kind of a wink, and so there's just this sort of camaraderie that kids also feel when they read it. 

20:16
So each semester with my adult students when I teach K-2 literacy, we use one or the other of those books, depending on the time of year, and we use those as they get introduced to how you could do story acting with children, and so that's the book. They perform. That book and those again I'll also say those are perfect for story acting, which is when usually the way I set it up, students mime the activity so I don't have them speaking it out loud. I make a clear stage. We have some boundaries about how they can and can't touch each other. I like those books because there's enough characters that multiple students can be involved in it, so that works really well. The movements are fun to engage in. And then also we talk about how the book kind of helps them understand the story a little bit better. And actually both of those are kind of modern retelling of how the world came to be stories. They're like a folktale, but they're not. 

21:20 - Dr Diane Jackson Schnoor (Host)
And they both lend themselves to science content as well. 

21:23 - Dr Cara Furman (Guest)
Yes, because I know. 

21:24 - Dr Diane Jackson Schnoor (Host)
I've used Big Mooncake for Little Star to teach moon phases, and one of the things I love about Grace is she saves the time for you. If you go to her website, she's got the science content on there with specific ideas that you can take. Oh, that's great, so there's a really cool activity for doing moon phases with kids. She also has some reader theater on there for some of her books as well, which is worth doing. But I love being able to take a book and then, after you've done sort of the acting and you've made it part of what you're doing, then you can also tie it into sort of your science content. It's that cross-pollination we were talking about earlier, finding additional ways to use it, and her books are terrific for it. You referenced mirrors and I know that you and I both know Dr Rudine Sims Bishop's work and the importance of books as windows and mirrors and sliding glass doors. Can you talk about that a little bit, because I imagine that connects really well into the idea of working from an ethical center. 

22:26 - Dr Cara Furman (Guest)
Yeah, yeah, so as a gloss. The idea is that children need to be able to look in the mirror and see themselves in books, and they also need to be able to look out and see others, and I never quite followed the sliding glass doors. Maybe you can explain that part a little bit. But what exactly does that part mean? 

22:53 - Dr Diane Jackson Schnoor (Host)
So that's the additional pieces come on. It's sort of that transformative moment of action that comes after you read a book. So, it's that invitation to step into another world or another experience. So it might be, after you've done all of that, maybe it's your project where you are connecting to the river in a deeper way, or something like that it's changing your point of view. 

23:17 - Dr Cara Furman (Guest)
Got it. So I've taught in rural Maine and now I teach in Manhattan, and so very different populations. I think something that's striking and really important is that in both places I was teaching there actually weren't a lot of the students the adult students hadn't experienced a lot of books growing up. That served as mirrors for them. So a lot of children's literature takes place in kind of, I guess I would say, a sort of middle class, affluent, suburban environment, and that didn't describe my students in rural Maine and it didn't really describe my students. It doesn't describe my students in Manhattan either. So a big part of my classes is always I bring in tons and tons of picture books and we spend a lot of time poring over them and we often do an activity that I took from Stephanie Jones, who's a literacy professor who I had, where the students will take a sticky note and they'll write into the book places where they see connection and places where they see disconnection. 

24:35
And that activity is not Stephanie's, but what is hers is she talks a lot about. We need to be not only connecting to books but also noticing places where we disconnect, and that that is okay and meaningful too. And so the students look at these different books and they have a moment, and what I think is really powerful about what they notice is that sometimes they have really close senses of a mirror child. And one of my students said oh my gosh, I'm from the Dominican Republic. I haven't seen children from the Dominican Republican books. I love this book and it really mattered to her. 

25:55 - Dr Diane Jackson Schnoor (Host)
And so that can be really powerful too. They'll say this book reminds me of my family, and it's, you knowed my life with a baby sister. His parents wrecked his life with a baby sister, so all the family dynamics were very similar in turn. And then the help for it and you're right, we don't often think about a mirror doesn't necessarily mean that the character is racially or gender the same as you. A mirror could be your experience. 

26:14 - Dr Cara Furman (Guest)
Absolutely. My older child was obsessed a few years ago with Kelly Yang's front desk series, and part of what the child is grappling with is making new friends and moving, although it's it's focusing on she's an immigrant from China and sort of dealing with poverty as her family is kind of finding their way in the United States. And my son has not experienced any of those things, but he has experienced moving and he just listened to those books on repeat when we were going through a big move and so they spoke to him in that way way. Something that I have noticed from doing this activity years and years and years, you know at this point is there are certain topics that I find it really, really hard to find high quality children's literature about. 

27:04
So when I started teaching in Maine, I had a lot of trouble finding books that featured Muslim families that weren't necessarily teaching us about Islam. They were just sort of Muslim families being families. That's improved a lot, largely because of, in my experience, jam. That was really on my radar because Maine has a very large Muslim immigrant population. Another topic which I still have not found great stuff on is deployment, and that was a huge experience for many of my students in Maine, both in the military but also in things like merchant mar, and it was really hard to find books that they could connect to. I think another one that always sort of sparked a lot of conversation were books about incarceration, and there are some high quality books about incarceration, although I haven't found a lot that feature white families and that in Maine that was. A lot of my students had family who were incarcerated and it was really important for them to see themselves in those books and again they were like I never had this as a child. 

28:28 - Dr Diane Jackson Schnoor (Host)
Well, and you raise a really important point too, and thinking about issues and thinking about books as windows and mirrors is no single book can be all things to all people. 

28:39
We need more than a single story, and so that's part of where it's so valuable to have multiple books tackling similar issues or different cultures, because you know your cultural experience in Maine, for example, you've got so many different experiences and One Morning in Maine does not cover it for everybody. 

29:00
No, you know, and Milo Imagines the World is a fabulous book in terms of looking at incarceration, its impact on two kids, but it doesn't cover the story for everybody and you know it just scratches the surface on that. And there are so many books, you know there's room for so much more and we need to be able to bring in those different books and, as you pointed out with your son, we don't necessarily even know there's no prescription. You can write that says this is going to be the magic, write that says this is going to be the magic book that your child is going to connect to. But it's that exposure, it's sharing lots of different books, providing them as windows and mirrors and sliding glass doors and then, as we said at the very beginning, being observant and understanding that child and knowing, okay, we made a connection. What do we do now? 

29:52 - Dr Cara Furman (Guest)
I think also part of where being philosophically minded comes in for me is really understanding and leading the students to look at. We'll look at the collection and say who's here and what's here and who's not here and what's not here. And I was teaching in a community that was mostly white and some semesters I left the books home that featured incarceration because they were mostly written by black authors to support, I think, black children, students who didn't have a lot of experience with diversity and with Black people. Having this window into the Black community that was kind of could lead to stereotyping. That would be problematic. 

30:52 - Dr Diane Jackson Schnoor (Host)
Right, because on its own that's creating a stereotype, unless it's presented with a much wider range of books that are looking at. All of all is a big word, but looking at many more aspects of the richness that makes up African-American culture, for example. 

31:10 - Dr Cara Furman (Guest)
That's right, yeah, and so again, I think as a philosopher, it's sort of asking what is the good that I'm trying to accomplish, how am I trying to accomplish it, and what are some other effects that might be happening while I'm doing this thing? 

31:23 - Dr Diane Jackson Schnoor (Host)
That makes a lot of sense. What do you think are some of the biggest issues facing teachers who are going out into the world today? 

31:33 - Dr Cara Furman (Guest)
I think trust and breakdowns in communication is one huge piece of it. So when I was a classroom teacher, sometimes topics that might be considered controversial would come up, such as one I remember a few times kids, just we read a picture book and a lot of kids started talking about death and it was a really emotional conversation. And in that conversation religion came up because the kids were bringing their backgrounds and in that moment I had daily contact with the families in my class. They dropped the kids off and they picked them up in the classroom and I was able to connect with the children who were especially affected by the conversation with their parents and say this is how I handled it. So I remember I'm not Catholic and I remember a child talking about being Catholic and asking me a specific question about some tenets of Catholicism and I said I can't answer that question for you, that's a question for your family. And then I was able to tell the family you know these questions came up and I directed her to you. 

32:50
If I don't have regular contact with families, then I don't necessarily have the chance to explain kind of and talk to them about what happened and how they want things handled, and I think things can then get kind of out of control pretty quickly. So my advice to teachers is to be constantly communicating not in writing, with families, because I think that can be hard too, but face to face, and any conversation that is going to be tricky or complicated to say I need you to come in to meet with me, I'd like to talk to you on the phone, you know all of those things. So you build the actual relationship with people and you're not operating on assumptions. I think the other issue and it kind of relates to trust is teachers need freedom to use their skills and their intelligence and the content that they've learned to apply what they know to what they see in front of them. And they, because of script. 

33:57
A lot of teachers are teaching with scripted curriculum. Scripted curriculum. There's pressure from families sometimes to share every single picture book before they read it. That makes it really hard for teachers to be responsive, and so, again, I'm not. I would never read a book to my class and keep it a secret from the families or tell the kids not to share with them. But I was constantly, as a teacher, choosing a book because at this moment, on this day, this was the book we needed and I can't vet that with the families ahead of time Right Well, and I know, when I'm doing programs with kids, I actually did one at a library the other day and I had a stack of about 10 books with me that were on display behind me. 

34:42 - Dr Diane Jackson Schnoor (Host)
But I picked the books that I shared to go with the various experiences in the moment, based on the response of the kids, the response of what we were doing and sort of where the energy was leading us. And I think that that's a very common thing that happens for teachers. You're you know you're going to have your, your tote bag filled with 10 books. You're not going to share them all, and it might be, you're you know you're going to have your, your tote bag filled with 10 books. You're not going to share them all, and it might be you've got the 10 books, but then a kid says something you're like oh, we actually need book number 11. And that's the book that you grab in that moment. And that's part of that improvisational aspect of teaching, of being present in the moment, and so if you've built the trust ahead of time, then hopefully there's respect for your professional judgment as well. 

35:26 - Dr Cara Furman (Guest)
And I think that I, as a parent, I don't actually want to entrust my children to somebody who isn't deviating from the script and just following the rules. That's actually pretty scary to me. From the script and just following the rules, that's actually pretty scary to me. It's really important to me that I send my kids to a school where the teachers have enough autonomy that if something is going very wrong, they can just step in, or if it's going very well, they can keep going with it. 

36:00
A really small example was that they're doing Forest Fridays in my younger son's kindergarten, where they're taking the kids outside every Friday for long, extended periods of time and they had this Forest Friday activity for the families and the teacher had set up all of these different activities for the kids to participate in, for the kids to participate in, and my son really didn't want to do any of those activities. He wanted to show me the garden that they had built together and he wanted to walk around the school and he wanted to eat some snacks and he just didn't want to focus on what was there and the teacher at some point said that's fine, these activities are here as a choice. He's got another agenda right now. We don't need to stick to the program for him. 

36:48 - Dr Diane Jackson Schnoor (Host)
And so they were able to make that decision based on the needs of your child and you know, thinking about their greater needs, you know they weren't looking at these activities as being a. This is your golden ticket to say you've passed this particular unit. It was these are enriching activities and come and go as you please. Absolutely, yep. I love that. So shameless plug time. Tell us a little bit about your podcast and about the books that you've written. 

37:17 - Dr Cara Furman (Guest)
Okay, so I have actually two podcasts, which sounds a little bit ridiculous. 

37:27
One of them is Thinking in the Midst, which is a podcast about philosophy in action, and I developed that podcast with my colleague, derek Gottlieb, and in that we interview two different guests, usually about a particular topic, and the idea is to have a conversation, and the phrase thinking in the midst comes actually from Plato. There's a scene in the symposium where they describe how, at some point, socrates was seen thinking in the midst of battle. Was the metaphor that he? And how weird it was that he was just kind of sitting there. So I don't think of the world as a battle, but I do really like the idea that one can just stop and pause, even when something like a battle is going on all around you. And so that's the podcast. And what does it mean? To take a pause and think about something together related to philosophy and action? So that's one. The other podcast that I do is teaching from an ethical center which comes out of my book, and in that one I interview teachers and it's one on one, conversations with the teacher about what their core values are and how these values live in their daily practice, and I try to bring in teachers and all kinds of experiences and all kinds of backgrounds, but the common denominator is that they're all teachers who I have identified as excellent and who are identified that way by their peer communities and who are identified that way by their peer communities, and they're all experienced. So I really am doing it to show the kinds of knowing that teachers have and I focus the episodes on their expertise. So one of the teachers that we interviewed is really good at making community. Another teacher that we interviewed that will be coming up in this season is an amazing math teacher, and so I focus on that. 

39:27
Range is my book on descriptive inquiry and teacher practice, and that's a book about really studying carefully and paying close attention to children and working collaboratively with other teachers to take what you've learned about children and help cater your instruction to the kids, and that was co -authored with my colleague and mentor, cecilia Trau. 

40:03
And then my most recent book is Teaching from an Ethical Center, which we've mentioned, and it's about how philosophical approaches, such as looking closely at word choice or doing the kinds of close reading of texts that you do every week with the authors, how that can help us be better teachers and what are the kinds of thorny issues of practice that help us to teach better. I guess one other thing I want to say is that my work is really committed to honoring who each individual is in all of these projects and it's really important to me in a moment where there's a lot of scripts and a lot of ideas that there's a particular way of doing things to showcase in my podcast and in my books that good teaching is not only adapting to the context and the kids you work with and the environment and the cultural environment and all of those factors, but good teachers draw on who they are. 

41:17
And so I guess I'll give one example. We went to this event at the kids school and my second graders teacher always dresses up in theme in relation to the events that she hosts. That is not something I would ever do. Like that just doesn't fit my personality. Like we had trouble finding the clothes that even dressed up my son correctly for today. Like we're not really a costume family but I love the joy and the energy that she brings into these outfits and like it just it makes me happy to see her teaching. 

41:56 - Dr Diane Jackson Schnoor (Host)
And she's living her best, teaching life by being authentically herself. 

42:00 - Dr Cara Furman (Guest)
Exactly that was actually the phrase I was going to use. Like it is her best teaching life and she looks so happy and I was really happy to see that. 

42:09 - Dr Diane Jackson Schnoor (Host)
I love that, so I'm going to put all of those links in there. I encourage you to check out Dr Cara Furman's work because it will make teaching so much more joyful for you and helping to connect to your own authentic self. And I want to leave with one final question. It's my favorite question to ask what brings you hope? 

42:30 - Dr Cara Furman (Guest)
Yeah, I thought about that one. I saw that one coming, so I'll try to be succinct. Ruth Wilson Gilmore is a geographer and she has this phrase where life is precious, life is precious, and I heard her first in an interview with Krista Tippett using that phrase, and I happened to be in Midtown Manhattan at the time in which I heard that and I was looking out the window where all I could see was concrete and I thought you know where money is precious, money is precious as well. I then started walking through the city and I decided I was going to document cracks, basically spaces of preciousness and so I took my camera and I looked. 

43:17
I saw people leaning towards each other drinking coffee. I saw people helping each other carry a bag. I saw people bending towards a child. I saw community gardens everywhere and all of that, and I became kind of obsessed with these community gardens and what it takes to put your plant out in the middle of this soot-filled city where anyone can trample it and to tend it for the community instead of tending it for yourself. And so what brings me hope is that I think where life is precious, it is precious, and that there's spaces of preciousness everywhere and we need to keep publicly growing those spaces. 

44:01 - Dr Diane Jackson Schnoor (Host)
I love that. Dr Cara Furman, thank you for joining us on the Adventures in Learning podcast. We appreciate all that you've shared with us today and I look forward to welcoming you back. Thank you so much. 

44:13 - Dr Cara Furman (Guest)
It's a pleasure.