Join the Hope College Education department in their monthly Diversity and Equity in Education speaker series with this virtual event featuring Dr. Charlene Montaño Nolan (Western Washington University). Her talk will address the need for place-based early childhood education to strengthen connections to the social and natural world. She will explore the practices of both wandering in our social-environmental contexts with caring others, and wondering about the past, present, and future workings of our world as processes that engage us in transformative teaching and learning. Charlene Montaño Nolan, Assistant Professor, teaches as part of the WWU-ECE Bremerton BAE program focusing on concept development and cognition in early childhood (birth-5) with an emphasis on culturally thriving, play-based, and place-based learning. Her scholarship focuses on developing equity-oriented theories of human learning that build upon diverse family and community leadership, teacher innovation, and child creativity and interest. Charlene earned her Ph.D from the University of Washington, with her dissertation entitled New Terrains for Familiar Places: Reconceptualizing Families Engaged in Educational Changemaking. Charlene enjoys learning outdoors and discovering how nature and culture support robust and meaningful educative experiences for children and adults. Charlene has diverse teaching and professional development experiences, including as an early childhood educator (birth to age five), a college instructor, and as a program “co-designer” with working teachers and families. She also has extensive experience in designing informal science-based learning programs for urban, Indigenous youth.
For more information: https://wce.wwu.edu/user/nolanc2