Myrna’s Children’s Village: Reflections on a dynamic early childhood laboratory school community in southern New Mexico

Abstract

In this article, the authors reflect on Myrna’s Children’s Village, their university laboratory school located in southern New Mexico in the USA. The Village serves children from the age of six weeks to five years through an array of early childhood programs. This diversity provides a unique context, while also posing issues and concerns, such as lack of collaboration across programs, and also how the authors’ critically framed teacher education program is in many ways disconnected from the developmental philosophies that guide most of the Village’s programs. Based on their discussions as faculty of early childhood who work with the Children’s Village, the authors offer their thoughts and insights about how the Village came to be, its purposes, and who they are as faculty in relation to the Village. The authors then offer possible new directions for the Children’s Village in which greater collaboration across programs is fostered along with stronger faculty engagement. The purpose of sharing these reflections is to encourage a shift in how, as a field, university laboratory schools are conceptualized and how collaboration might be enhanced within dynamic early childhood contexts.

An Integrative Literature Review of University-Based Early Childhood Education and Care Centres within Early Childhood Teacher Education Settings

“…In the United States, training activities as a part of ECEC have developed from a university-based laboratory school by John Dewey since 1896 [27]. Laboratory schools are also known as training schools, model schools, practice schools [31] and demonstration schools [32]. According to McBride et al [22], to be called a laboratory school, it should implement at least one academic mission.…”

“…Educational collaboration includes many types of training, which should be defined more clearly and implemented more consistently among teacher education programmes, see [34]. In this article, practicum and internship are understood as types of supervised training, e.g., [32,35]. Instead, student teaching (in this article, preservice teaching) is understood as an experience that offers preservice teachers an opportunity to work in the university ECEC centre either under supervision, e.g., [15,31] or independently, e.g., [24,35].…”

“…The top right quadrant represents approximately 64% (n = 34) of the centres. These university ECEC centres implemented academic functions in their daily activities [3,15,18,23,24,31,32,35,36,40,43,[55][56][57][58][59][60][61][62][63][64][65][66][67][68][69][70][71] and are reviewed in Section 3.2.…”

“…Laboratory school 1 [60]; URI Child Development Center [62]; Dr. Pat Feinstein Child Development Center [62]; Myrna's Children's Village [32]; Harriett Laboratory School [67]; Malcolm Price Laboratory School [68]; Child development laboratory school 1 [69]; Child Development Center for Learning and Research [70] Hashemite University nursery [55]; Early Childhood Research Laboratory [63]; University laboratory preschool 1 [3], Laboratory preschool 1 [64]; The SM Laboratory Preschool [71] Medical school (n = 1)…”

“…Third, the USC/Gateway Child Development and Research Center [18] was created and is operated in partnership with a for-profit contractor, Gateway Academy. Fourth, Myrna's Children's Village [32] combines various funding sources and partnerships with community programmes and state agencies. It operates several ECEC programmes that have their own curriculum and structural features, such as opening hours, number of children and principles regarding maintaining children's welfare and safety.…”