Title: Connecting the Campus to Children
Presenters: Mary Ann Marchel, Ph.D.; Molly Minkkinen, Ph.D.; Paul Deputy, (add); Leann Scalia
Mary Ann Marchel, Ph.D., (University Minnesota, Educational Psychology with an emphasis in Early Childhood Special Education) coordinates the Early Childhood Studies Program at the University of Minnesota Duluth (UMD). As part of her role, she serves as faculty liaison to the UMD Children’s Place. She has eight years of experience working with young children with diverse ability levels and their families.
Molly H. Minkkinen, Ph.D., (University of Minnesota, Curriculum and Instruction with an emphasis in Early Childhood Education) is an assistant professor in the Early Childhood Studies Program at the University of Minnesota Duluth. As part of her role, she is conducting photo-ethnographic research at the University of Minnesota Duluth Children’s Place. She has 16 years of experience working with young children and their families. She is known for her expertise in brain based learning and conducts workshops for regional districts and agencies.
Paul Deputy, Ph. D., CCC-SLP (Michigan State University, Speech-Language Pathology), is the Dean of the College of Education and Human Services Professions at the University of Minnesota Duluth. He formerly taught coursework in and contributes to the literature base in Communication Sciences and Disorders and has extensive experiences working with young children with speech and language delays and disorders. He has provided administrative leadership in the planning and development of the University of Minnesota Duluth Children’s Place.
Leann Scalia, M.A.Ed., (Concordia University – St. Paul, Emphasis in Early Childhood) is the director of the University of Minnesota Duluth Children’s Place. She is in the last third of a doctoral program in Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Minnesota. Leann has twenty years of experience in a campus based child care program, twelve years of which has been as a director.
Overview of Presentation
Administration, faculty, and child care staff from the University of Minnesota Duluth use Bronfenbrenner’s (1979) framework to share their story about a collaborative, interdisciplinary, university-wide effort to develop and implement a campus based child care center.
The presenters use Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological Perspective as a framework to describe the influences within and across systems that impacted the development of the UMD’s Children’s Place, an inclusive early care and education program for young children and families. The implication is that campus child care centers can use this framework to ferret out the complex factors at several increasingly broad levels which can serve as facilitating or inhibiting factors for future development.
The second part of the presentation features preliminary findings from a comprehensive ethnographic study that examines past and present influences on the emergence and growth of UMD Children’s Place. Semi-structured interviews with professionals with past and present involvement in the child care provide information about interwoven threads of the historical and present fabric that comprises the UMD Children’s Place story. The voices of the past and present lend insight to the developmental and implementation processes of campus based child care.
Development of University of Minnesota Duluth Children’s Place: An Ecological Perspective
The Ecological Perspective (Bronfenbrenner, 1979) offers a lens through which to examine interactions that occur between the children enrolled in the University of Minnesota Duluth Children’s Place and his/her world. According to Ecological Perspective, there are influences present in the child’s immediate and surrounding environment that directly and indirectly impact the child’s development. A bi-directional relationship exists between influences across a concentric organization of circles or subsystems. A discussion of the subsystems and their application to the Children’s Place at University of Minnesota Duluth follows.
The microsystem, the innermost circle, consists of a complex set of relations between the developing child and the immediate environment. Influential factors within the microsystem that impact the child are the family, peers of diverse ability and background, child care staff with advanced degree, an eclectic curriculum, and Unified Early Childhood Program faculty and students.
The mesosystem, which surrounds the microsystem, embraces specific formal and informal social structures that do not themselves contain the developing person, but impinge upon or encompass the immediate settings in which that child is found, and thereby influence, delimit, or even determine what goes on there. Included are faculty liaison, mental health services, health consultant, family connections, home, early childhood special education, Head Start, Individual Education Plan/Individualized Family Service Plan related services, and auxiliary services.
The exosystem, the next of the concentric circles, refers to situations, settings, and events that have a bearing on the child’s development, but in which the developing child does not actually play a direct role. At the University of Minnesota Duluth’s Children’s Place this includes administrative support at the college and university levels, relationships with community based agencies and collaboration with academic units from across the university. The macrosystem, the outermost subsystem, refers to the overarching institutional patterns of the culture or subculture, such as the economic, social, legal, educational, and political systems in which the micro-, meso-, and exosystems are the concrete manifestations. Embedded within the macrosystem are influences such as statewide initiatives, the nationwide push for academic “rigor”, media attention to economic feasibility studies, University of Minnesota initiatives, and broader sociopolitical influences.
Presenters seriously suggested an additional subsystem, the cosmosystem, an overarching set of influences that spans the past, present and future visions and includes deep rooted human values about something better for future generations.
Voices of the Past and Present
Preliminary findings from an ethnographic study that examines historical and current influences on the child care frame the second part of the presentation. As indicated in the summaries of conversations with campus based child care advocates from the past and present, the vision of campus based child care has existed for the past 35 years. Highlights from beginning conversations are discussed below.
A former University of Minnesota Duluth Early Childhood Studies faculty member shared the following themes related to the evolution of the campus based child care emerged. A predominant thread shared in this conversation was the “struggle” faced by campus child care advocates in the definition of the mission of the child care. It was difficult to determine whether the primary focus of a campus child care was education or care. This tension was further enhanced by the model in place on the University of Minnesota Twin Cities Campus (a tier one institution, much larger, but often compared to the Duluth Campus) that had both a “lab” oriented preschool in the Institute of Child Development, focused on education and research; and a child care center whose mission emphasized “care”.
An ad hoc committee, “the Commission on Women” was created in 1976 to study women’s issues on the University of Minnesota Duluth campus. In a conversation with one of the Commission’s early members, the following themes related campus based child care emerged: The need for child care emerged as a women’s issue on campus. In the late 1970’s when a task force to study the need for child care on campus was appointed, no men were at the table. Women in tenure track positions were a minority on campus. Several child care task forces studied the issues and made recommendations for the creation of a campus based child care. These recommendations were consistently “trumped” by financial constraints. The most recent child care task force included men. Perhaps because of the increased number of faculty members who are moms, and the expanded role of women, the child care will become a reality. The notion of a “conflicted role of women” and the need for mothers to perform all responsibilities with perfection might lead some to question the presence of a child care on campus. Is the dependence on care outside the home in conflict with what is best for the development of young children and the performance of the role of mother?
Four themes emerged from conversations with three teachers at UMD Children’s Place. First, a sense of vision. Each had a picture of where she wanted her classroom to be with children, yet set within the context of the work of others which brought them here. The second theme is that of professionalism. It relates to the theme of vision in that each understood that the University vision for a program would see them as professionals and support them as such from salary and professional growth to the willingness to work collaboratively across disciplines. The third theme was that of community which fits particularly well with the Bronfenbrenner theory. They see Children’s Place as a community within the greater community of UMD; they also see the connections to the City of Duluth through their work in the education and care for young children. The fourth theme is that of being empowered to continue the vision and implement it. They were on staff early, allowed to make choices about the environment as it was being planned, and to help problem solve construction issues as they arose. Overall, there was a delight in being a part of the process and the fulfillment of the dreams of others.