Fostering Healthy Identity in the Early Years: Accepting the Responsibility & Embracing the Opportunity

This immersion supports educators in creating learning environments that affirm children’s racial, ethnic, cultural, and social identities while fostering a strong sense of belonging. Participants explore how identity develops in early childhood, how socialization shapes children’s experiences, and how classroom practices can either support or undermine healthy identity development.

Educators will reflect on their own identities and experiences, examine classroom materials and interactions, and strengthen their capacity to create identity-affirming, culturally sustaining environments for young children.

Teacher as Researcher: Uncovering the Power of Play

Are you ready to dive deeper into the transformative power of play and discover how it shapes children’s learning and development? In this immersion, we explore how early childhood educators can engage in teacher action research to document how play can be a powerful driver of growth, curiosity, and engagement. You’ll learn how to design and implement teacher-led research projects that examine the impact of leading with play in your classroom.

By actively investigating your own teaching, you’ll not only deepen your understanding of how play supports learning but also become an agent of change—equipped to elevate play-based education in your school and beyond.

Advocacy as Resistance, Repair, and Reclaiming the Profession

Caring for young children has never been more essential to our future, yet it is immensely challenging today. We know that society can’t function if children aren't well cared for, yet early care and education remain undervalued and underappreciated. School reform efforts focused on standards, grit, and test scores often leave early childhood education and care with insufficient time to nurture relationships and sustain joyful environments. Early childhood educators and care professionals remain caught in a complex web of trying to do what is best for children under enormous constraints that disregard their knowledge and skills and curtail their agency.

In this immersion, we explore advocacy as a tool to resist harmful policies and mandates, to repair the harm caused by moral injury, and to reclaim early childhood education and care as a profession that centers the needs of young children, their families, and their teachers and caregivers.