Child & Adolescent Development

Asked why he chose SF State, Assistant Professor of Child & Adolescent Development Miguel Abad says, “San Francisco State University signifies access to higher education to young people who don't have that opportunity, have been pushed out of school, been written off, or have been told that higher education is not something they could strive to get into. San Francisco State has been that place to take in young people who aren't the traditional college-going story.”

Abad is a youth worker with more than a decade of experience collaborating with community-based and nonprofit organizations in the Bay Area in numerous fields, such as college access, career development, arts education and social movement organizing.

Angela Fillingim, a new assistant professor in the Department of Sociology & Sexuality Studies, says, “Relevant education permeates the entire school culture, not just in ethnic studies — which is the heartbeat that's embraced across the campus, but with a variety of different people with varying majors, and they all still feel that sense of community.”

A Salvadoran American sociologist, Fillingim centers her teaching and research center on social justice approaches to studies of race, human rights, social theory and Latinas/xs/os.

When discussing the theme of “When I Dare to Be Powerful,” based on the above Audre Lorde quote, both faculty members have similar experiences of pressure to conform to rigid ideas of what it means to be successful as an academic and how they put in the work to get away from finding validation in dominant norms.

Abad and Fillingim agree that daring to be powerful includes focusing on how to contribute to our community and the people they try to advocate for. Abad states, “It takes a lot of intention and awareness of the spaces you are moving in and a lot of self-reflection as to why you are doing something and who you are accountable for.”

Fillingim highlighted that after leaving graduate school, students learn to ask questions that call attention to the problems they face in the communities they come from. She says that power means “you must learn to be comfortable flipping the script and being at an institution where that is valued, centered in the students, and having a space that also values that work.”

Reflecting on how they face issues of diversity, equity and inclusion in their own lives, Abad and Fillingim say their experiences make them consider their own encumbrances to the struggles others may experience. They recognize in their own lives that to overcome these hindrances, they must aim to be grounded in a community where they work to support and acknowledge each other.

“Justice will look different for everybody, but the point is that you are working together to change something, and we can agree that change needs to happen,” Fillingim says.

The two new faculty members emphasize the role of education in breaking barriers. Fillingim reflects on her experiences in the K-12 system that focuses on discipline and obedience instead of encouraging students to develop themselves. She can see this repetition with high schoolers she works with; many students come in with that socialization. “Focusing on education that is dedicated to understanding its students and making education meaningful to their daily lives, who they want to be as a person, and the choices they make —that is the kind of education that is revolutionary and necessary,” she says.

Abad touches on this topic with the classes he teaches, such as having his students read about Native American boarding schools and asking them to reflect on themselves and learn about or challenge their assumptions that education is always a good thing.

When working with students, whether in a college class or a community-based space, Abad tries to focus on promoting collaboration and teamwork. He is struck by students’ adverse reaction to teamwork. He says, “Not only in school but in society [students] are taught, or they come to learn that collaboration is this thing that is too hard and it holds them back as individuals or that it is this negative thing.”

“Education is a vehicle for delivering particular values, and the kinds of values I and others hope to deliver are those focused on radical transformation and social justice,” Abad says.

He recognizes the slow work of helping his students see how they are more powerful together, and how the changes they want to see in themselves and their world will only happen if they work together and express similar values.

Fillingim shares similar values about work needing to be put into the K-12 system. “There hasn't been significant change despite all this work that has been done… there needs to be thinking of education as relevant, grounded in community, grounded in self-actualization,” she says.

Fillingim and Abad both express hope that education centered on self-actualization is possible, and that through the continuous challenges we face, people are working to push through and advocate for social justice-grounded change within education.

A new report highlights the detrimental discrepancies between child neglect laws and child development research

For children, being allowed to walk to a playground or to school by themselves is an exciting achievement — a sign they’re becoming “big kids.” Developmental scientists agree: They say such moments are critical milestones in a child’s development. Yet there are many child neglect laws in the United States that conflict with research about childhood and may actually interfere with development.

A new Social Policy Report paper by San Francisco State University Assistant Professor Rachel Flynn and collaborators explores this conflict and asks at what age can a child perform tasks without adult supervision. The answer is tricky, the authors explain, but reducing the answer to an age range (usually in preteens to early teens) can have serious consequences. It can lead to parents and guardians being unfairly prosecuted and be harmful for families and children. To complicate matters more, broad child neglect laws dramatically vary across the nation.

“I like to think [the laws are] well-intentioned and meant to keep kids safe. But the fact that there are places in the country where it is illegal for a child to be alone at 10 or 12 or babysit for their younger siblings … most developmental [scientists] would never guess that,” said Flynn, an assistant professor in the Department of Child & Adolescent Development at San Francisco State.

These child neglect laws often do not align with developmental science research, the authors explain. Previous research in the United States and internationally suggest children undergo a shift to taking on more responsibilities around 5 to 7 years. To participate in independent activities, children need to reach developmental milestones in physical, cognitive and social abilities, and most children achieve these skills by 6 or 7 through experiences. A child’s ability to achieve these milestones are also dependent on many factors, so guidelines based on age alone without context are not effective.

“I think the other really big thing is remembering to keep this in the social justice lens … ,” Flynn said. “We’re really trying to drive home the idea that these child neglect laws can impact anyone anywhere, but children of color are particularly impacted …  They’re more likely to have touch points with child protective services than white children as a result.”

Well-meaning but misplaced reports of child neglect due to lack of supervision can strain child protective systems that are intended to protect children. Flynn hopes everyone — policymakers, developmental science researchers, grade-school educators, pediatricians, parents and social work hotline moderators — look at the research paper’s recommendations to begin mitigating the negative impacts of some laws.

“Hotlines were meant to help children,” Flynn said. “They’re not helpful when every person calls because of every situation that they personally disagree with, for example a child walking their dog around the block alone. That clogs up resources and keeps the true neglect and abuse cases from getting the attention.”

Flynn was surprised to see the lack of developmental research on this topic but attributes this to a lack of awareness. There are psychologists, educational researchers and health researchers doing relevant research, but they don’t all talk together.

While her own research usually focuses on the media’s impact on children and how it affects play, Flynn plans to take the lessons of her recent paper into her advocacy work. She has already talked to some policy makers and hopes to help educate hotline workers and others.

“The question always is what age can kids be unsupervised? There’s no straightforward answer. It’s rooted in individual differences in context and cultures and variations,” Flynn said. “But we can provide some guidelines to really say that children are very capable at a very young age, and with experience children can be even more capable.”

Learn more about SF State’s Department of Child & Adolescent Development.

Republished from SF State News

Miguel Abad

Assistant Professor, Department of Child & Adolescent Development

Miguel Abad (pronouns: he/they) is a youth worker with more than a decade of experience collaborating with community-based and nonprofit organizations in the Bay Area in numerous fields such as college access, career development, arts education and social movement organizing. As a youth studies researcher, Abad’s scholarly work touches upon race and social justice, out of school time education, youth development, youth activism, and participatory action research.

Angela Fillingim

Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology & Sexuality Studies

Angela Fillingim is a Salvadoran American sociologist. She received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley and was a Chancellor's Post-Doctoral Fellow at UC Irvine. Prior to coming to SF State, she was the co-director of the Education and Social Justice Program and faculty in the interdisciplinary college at Western Washington University. Her teaching and research center social justice approaches to studies of race, human rights, social theory and Latinas/xs/os.

Cynthia Martinez

Assistant Professor, Department of Counseling

Cynthia Martinez’s scholarship interests lie in participant action research and include working with BIPOC families to create non-traditional therapeutic wellness groups. Martinez is also interested in studying trauma-informed, anti-racist advocacy and radical self-care for practitioners experiencing collective trauma. Her pedagogical frameworks include, community organizing, popular education, trauma-informed clinical supports, decolonizing critical praxis and antiracist advocacy. As a psychologist, her clinical training and expertise is in complex trauma and narrative and social justice postmodern theories. Prior to graduate school, she worked as an immigrant rights activist and obtained extensive experience in grassroots community organizing. Born and raised in San Francisco’s Mission District, Martinez is a proud child of immigrants from Guatemala and a first-generation college and graduate student.

Soyhela Mohammadigorgi

Assistant Professor, Family, Interiors, Nutrition & Apparel Department

Soheyla Mohammadigorgi received her bachelor’s in Industrial Design from the University of Tehran, her first master’s in Industrial Design from Amir Kabir University of Technology (Tehran Polytechnic), her second master’s from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and her Ph.D. from the University of Florida, majoring in Design, Construction and Planning with a concentration in Interior Design. Before joining SF State, she worked as a research assistant professor at Clemson University. Her research focuses on improving health care security through space planning and design.

This paper shares the results of a large-scale longitudinal study in Kenya and examines to what extent school-entry early mathematics and literacy skills predict students’ later achievement. Controlling for socioeconomic status, intervention status, rural versus urban settings and parental literacy, the findings revealed that school-entry mathematics skills were significantly predictive of students’ end of Grade 2 mathematics and reading achievement in English and Kiswahili. Likewise, school-entry English early literacy skills predicted students’ end of Grade 2 mathematics and reading achievement in English and Kiswahili. As one of the first articles in this area of research in a low-income country, this article extends earlier research on links between elements of school readiness and later achievement in high-income countries.

Christine Nevarez, early practicum support specialist (left) and Linda Platas, assistant professor of child and adolescent development

High school became a refuge for the bright and talkative teen as she moved between friends and relatives, preparing to take on college. Yet when her financial aid package finally arrived, she learned it wouldn’t cover all her college expenses. But a teacher at Palo Alto High School — the same one loaning her the car for the driving test — housed Estrada for the summer and set up a Go Fund Me site to raise the money she needed.

“I got $24,000 in 24 hours from all my teachers,” she says. “That’s why I want to be a teacher — to help other students.” She adds, “That’s why education is so important to me; it’s something that can never be taken away from you.”

Hurtado also feels a deeply personal, though different, connection to teaching. She remembers arriving from Mexico as a shy 5-year-old struggling with a new language and a new country. She noticed that teachers seemed to prefer interacting with certain children, while casting others aside. “I remember every gesture teachers made, both positive and negative,” she says, recalling hurtful slights she endured. “People think, ‘Oh they’re just little kids, they’ll forget about it. But in reality, that’s the time you take in everything.” She wants to work with kids so she can be present for every child, dispensing the positive gestures she didn’t always receive herself.
 

Stephanie Estrada works with preschool children.

Both Estrada and Hurtado enrolled in the early practicum, CAD 215: Foundations in Early Childhood, because it allowed them to follow up their interest with real preschool-classroom experience before committing to the major and the career track. The year-long experiential program is an SF State-led experimental iteration of Jumpstart, a national curriculum that allows college students to lead preschoolers through literacy activities. SF State’s pilot is unique both for its focus on early literacy and math-based activities, and, just as importantly, for the experience it provides students.

“The students are learning how to be a teacher in all of its aspects, from lesson planning to activity planning to interacting with children to talking with parents,” says Linda Platas, an assistant professor in the Department of Child & Adolescent Development (CAD) and the pilot’s main architect. And her students, mostly freshmen and sophomores, can apply to the CAD major and go directly into the profession while they finish their bachelor’s degree. “It’s not just about helping young children with their literacy skills. It’s about creating the workforce, supporting the [preschool] teachers and the students they work with, and doing it all with a wider developmental view,” says Platas, who spent 14 years working as a preschool teacher before earning her Ph.D. at UC Berkeley.

Math and more

That wider developmental view has its roots in a seminal 2007 study, which found that early understanding of math concepts predicts not only better math skills later on, but better reading skills as well. SF State’s pilot, launched by the CAD department in 2016, is one of just a few math-based early learning programs in California (along with Stanford and UCLA) to follow up on that study.

“The best and richest activities have all the domains of learning — including language and literacy, science, mathematics, the arts, and social studies elements like understanding culture and communities,” Platas explains, adding that elements like vocabulary and socio-emotional skills cross all of the domains. “You’re always going to be talking to the children and making sure your conversations are really rich no matter what topic you’re discussing,” she says, “and the game format helps students learn how to interact socially.”

To create the early practicum, Platas leveraged the existing Jumpstart class, which already placed undergraduates in San Francisco preschool classes serving low-income kids, and expanded its developmental focus. The Dhanam Foundation provided funding for the pilot. Students were recruited both from the Metro Academy, a program that supports first-generation college students like Estrada and Hurtado, and students in CAD classes. Platas’ secret weapon is a classroom coach, Christine Nevarez, who supports the students in the college and preschool settings, co-teaches with Platas and enlists new recruits.

Practicum students have experienced all that value in action. Noelle Akousa Dankwa Owusu, a rising senior, learned about the course when Nevarez visited her education class. Hailing from a family of nurses in Temecula, near San Diego, Owusu had been pre-nursing until she discovered she had little tolerance for blood. So when her interest turned to education, she especially appreciated the practicum’s try-it-first opportunity. Once she started working with the kids, she knew she’d found where she belonged.

Over eight months, Owusu transformed from a nervous newcomer to a confident member of the classroom who is ready for the next challenge. “Problem-solving and seeing how the different kids learn and what keeps them interested … those are all tools I can use when I go on to another class or another site,” she says.

And she’s seen first-hand how the math games teach more than just math. One child, an English-language learner like many of the students at his Sunset neighborhood school, was shy and quiet — but she started doing shape activities with him, and he loved it. “He really liked the word ‘hexagon’ so I’d make sure to talk about it more,” Owusu says. Soon he was greeting her at the door requesting to do the shape activity. And he was talking more. Now, she says, “He talks a lot. He’s even a little bit of a smart-mouth — he’s the sort of kid who constantly asks ‘Why’?”

New pathways to training

The practicum pilot complements a robust existing program in the CAD department that supports the early childhood workforce. Started in 2012, the Promoting Achievement Through Higher Education program, or PATH, offers evening and weekend classes to help employed preschool teachers continue working while earning their bachelor’s degree in child and adolescent development. PATH is also designed to bring a new and diverse group of upper-division undergraduates to the profession, according to Lygia Stebbing, who runs PATH under the umbrella of EDvance — a constellation of programs at SF State’s Marian Wright Edelman Institute and in the CAD department that create pathways to a B.A. for early childhood educators.

The partnership between Platas, PATH, the Dhanam Foundation and Jumpstart made it possible to initiate the new early practicum — with its wider developmental focus than previous CAD practicums — as a pilot project in 2016. Besides providing freshmen and sophomores with classroom and teacher experience, the early practicum pilot connects them to the PATH program as upper-division students.

From the perspective of an early practicum student, moving right into PATH is an attractive option — a two-year graduation track with a guaranteed slot in classes. Owusu, who is continuing to PATH in 2017, appreciates not having to compete with a crowd of “crashers” all trying to get into the same required classes, but she also likes knowing exactly where she’s headed. “PATH is super awesome because it gives you a path. It gives you milestones so you can see what’s coming next. That’s motivating,” she says.

Noelle Akousa Dankwa Owusu (left) and Maria Olalde (far right) engage preschool kids in a learning activity. 

A success on many levels

When Platas and Stebbing try to explain how all the programs and feeders and funders connect, they both start, stop, draw in a deep breath, and just say, “It’s complicated.” What’s not complicated is how well the unified constellation of programs is working.

“It’s a huge success,” says Stebbing. “One hundred percent of PATH students graduate in two years.” And because they need to have a job to be in the program, PATH students have 100 percent employment, helped along by local agencies, who hand-pick PATH students for placement. And their students are staying in the field, Stebbing adds. “At least 50 percent are going on to get their master’s.” The early practicum alone has a 100 percent retention rate.

Perhaps the greatest measure of success for a pilot is adoption, and Platas’ year-long math-based early practicum is being fully adopted in Fall 2017 as SF State’s only Jumpstart program.

Owusu, Estrada and Hurtado are case studies within the statistics. Deeply attached to her students, Hurtado feels called to a future as an educator and bringing all she’s learned to the kids in her East Oakland community. She ultimately decided that PATH’s prescribed curriculum and late-night commutes weren’t right for her, but she’s sticking with the traditional CAD major.

Both Estrada and Owusu have their PATH jobs lined up and credit the early practicum with inspiring them to plan for graduate school and other ways to elevate their education careers down the line. And both young women measure the success of the program not just by their employment, but also by the dedication and passion of the early childhood education community at SF State and across the city — a community that recognizes the transformative power teachers wield, starting with the youngest kids.

“You don’t know what the kids experience in their lives when they’re not with us, so we give them our all during those hours we’re together,” says Owusu. “The time they spend with you should be meaningful.”