Occasional Paper Series #46
Re-Storying Ourselves as Early Childhood Teachers Amidst COVID: Toward Needed Transformations
by Julie Orelien-Hernandez, Patricia (Patty) Pión, and Rafaella (Rafa) Soares-Bailey
COVID-19 has shattered the walls of the school buildings. It has stripped its walls bare, reminding us of the shortcomings of a broken system. It has disrupted and altered taken-for-granted meanings of teaching, inviting us to reimagine education. More importantly, it has invited us to reimagine who we were—and are—as teachers and human beings.
We, three New York City early childhood teachers, Patricia (Patty) Pión, Julie Orelien-Hernandez, and Rafaella (Rafa) Soares-Bailey, will share what the pandemic meant for us as experienced teachers and the irony of learning anew how to teach children. From these shared experiences, we have begun to form new ideas of colleagueship, friendship, self-care, and humanity.
Julie Orelien-Hernandez is a teacher at a Reggio Emilia preschool in Manhattan, New York. She has been teaching for five years. She has learned and experienced different approaches of education, amongst them Waldorf, Montessori, Reggio Emilia, and public school. She is pursuing her master’s degree in early childhood education at Teachers College, Columbia University.
Patricia (Patty) Pión is a dual-language teacher in her 19th year working for the New York City Department of Education. She is currently teaching kindergarten and first grade in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, New York. In 2019, she presented at the Reimagining Education Summer Institute and at the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) annual convention. She is in her first year of her doctoral studies at Teachers College, Columbia University.
Rafaella (Rafa) Soares-Bailey is a teacher at a Montessori Preschool in Brooklyn, New York. She has been teaching for six years and working with children for more than 15 years. She is currently pursuing her master’s degree in early childhood education at Teachers College, Columbia University.