This fifth edition of Families, Schools, and Communities: Building Partnerships for Educating Children provides teachers and teacher candidates with a comprehensive guide to establishing collaboration with parents and the larger community. This text will help future teachers develop the understanding and tools they need to work with others to give children a better education. The underlying message of this book is that all persons involved in early childhood education or child advocacy should join hands in promoting the highest quality of education for young children in America.
Features include:
Chapter Objectives, Summaries and Questions Vignettes - real life stories/events that clarify the concepts throughout the chapters.
Reflections - these reflections ask the reader to pause and connect some particular content to their own life experiences.
Implications for Teachers - new feature that provides connections between the ideas in the text and real life application in classrooms and schools.
Bibliography of Children's Literature
New to This Edition:
The authors have added features and rearranged the topics to give this text better coherence and greater usability. Readers will find we have updated references and resources throughout but have streamlined the research citations to provide for smoother reading. We removed the chapter on school curriculum but included suitable parts of that in other chapters. We have renamed some chapters to reflect changes in content, and we have grouped References by each chapter.
- New Figures and Tables throughout the chapters update data on demographics of American families and communities.
- New vignettes and illustrations to help readers understand the uniqueness of family life and the diversity in our country.
- "Implications for Teachers:..." featured in each chapter give readers practical suggestions for trying out the ideas in the real world.
- The Special Needs area is addressed more intensely by showing readers how to work with families of children with disabilities.
- Family Systems Theory is highlighted to show the importance of understanding total family functioning in addition to the differences of individuals.
- Protecting children has a higher profile. Authors include more information on the growing problems and concerns about obesity, bullying, substance and sexual abuse and help readers fit these concerns into the role of education.
- Media pluses and minuses are highlighted in our chapters so readers understand when the benefits of expanded media opportunities can shift to exploitation and abuse.
Chandler Barbour, a retired professor of education, has spent over 40 years in elementary school
teaching, school administration, and university teaching. His strong interests in educational
partnerships for teachers in training and appropriate curriculum for children have led to research and
writing on school collaborations and networks. He is a co-author of two earlier publications:Partnerships
in Education (1970), AACTE and The Teaching Clinic (1974), Ass'n of Teacher Educators,
plus articles and reports for professional journals in Education. In retirement, Mr. Barbour lives in
coastal Maine and devotes volunteer time to public school projects, church programs, and prison
inmate counseling. He also serves as a board director for a fishing advocacy group, a church facilities
board, and one regional hospital board.
Nita H. Barbour is a retired University of Maryland professor with over 30 years in teaching,
researching and curriculum program development for educational facilities in three states. Her
professional work covers involvement with programs for populations ranging from preschool to
university graduate courses. Nita's Fulbright Scholarship in language study in the 1950s led to a career
long interest in the uses of language and the impact of language and culture on education. This interest
has followed her into retirement as a feature of the language literacy programs she has established for
preschoolers in her Maine community. Professor Barbour is a co-author of two earlier textbooks in the
early childhood field: Early Childhood Education: An Introduction, 4e, 1998, Merrill/Prentice Hall and
Developmental Continuity Across Preschool & Primary Grades, 2e, 2004, Ass'n of Childhood
Education International.
Dr. Patricia Scully is an Associate Professor at the University of Maryland Baltimore
County (UMBC) where she directs the early childhood teacher education program and
teaches courses in early literacy, children’s literature, and curriculum. Earlier in her
career, Dr. Scully taught in child care centers and public school classrooms working with
children from two to 12 years of age in New Jersey, New York City, and Maryland. She
has been a child care center director and has worked extensively in professional
development for child care professionals. She is a graduate of The College of New
Jersey, Teachers College, Columbia University and the University of Maryland College
Park. Her publications include articles in the Early Childhood Journal and Young
Children as well as the book, Developmental Continuity across Preschool and Primary
Grades, 2nd Ed. published by the Association for Childhood Education International.
