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I so appreciate this conversation! I’m a nanny now, but originally studied elementary ed, and this kind of conversation could really have helped me make sense of “classroom management”, something I struggled with so much that I could not finish my teaching program. I deeply value allowing children to have autonomy in their lives (from birth!), while at the same time I see how they thrive with a degree of adult-provided structure/ predictability, and find that many conversations on the topic are black & white and reductive. Would that every teacher had this training! 🙏🏻

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Angela, I so appreciate your comment! Working with a smaller group of children, or just one child, is very important work, and can teach us so much about that balance between fostering interdependence in a group and fostering autonomy as an individual. Rachel and I have both had that experience, as you can see. And yet no two paths, when it comes to caregiving, look the same. It sounds like you are following yours with great integrity.

It is still an uphill battle to promote respectful and restorative approaches to community-building vs. ones built on carceral logic in many K-12 educational spaces, but it is one I hope we empathic educators will ultimately win. If there are any other resources you'd like to see along these lines in this space, I'd love to know and to consider that for future essays/interviews!

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