Cara Furman
Biographic Data
| ID | 5398513 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Cara Furman |
| GIVEN NAMES | Cara |
| FAMILY NAME | Furman |
| SIGNATURE | FURMAN C |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Maine at Farmington |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3482-0675 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 25 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 5 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 25 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2017 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
The Confession‐Grade Exchange
This article tells the story of how an undergraduate future teacher, Jessie, gave an account of her hardships in the hopes of gaining a better grade. Responding to this episode, I name it a “confession‐grade exchange.” I then offer a descriptive account of grading, grading as an exchange, and confession as an exchange. Building from this analysis, I offer an ameliorative reframing centered on reciprocity and responsibility
Practical wisdom for ethical and effective teaching (of reading)
Today it happened. That moment I lived for as a first-grade teacher when a child spontaneously chooses to and can successfully read. At breakfast, my son glanced at a magazine on the table and slow
Finding Hope in Barbara Stengel’s Responsibility
Teaching for Human Dignity
Integrated Restatement
I know these two
Teaching for human dignity
How do we teach for human dignity in a context where life is, generally speaking, not treated as precious? How do we carve spaces for humanity amidst inhumane contexts? In this paper, five experienced teachers share how they work from the cracks to expand spaces for human dignity in their schools. They write and act as teacher-philosophers, dually considering it means to teach for human dignity and practically speaking how it can be done
Interruptions as collaborative grappling with time
Teachers face dilemmas of justice throughout their day that call for ethical decisions. Recent projects have focused on how teachers can be supported in making these decisions. In this paper we draw on practices in philosophy of education and math education to put forth our own method, Interruptions, for supporting teachers with the prosaic dilemmas of ethical teaching. After describing Interruptions and placing the method within a pre-service te…
Teacher talk in an early educator blog
This paper examines teacher discourse and the building of culture circles in an asynchronous collaborative blog that combined two different classes in an Early Childhood MS Ed program. Social speech is often considered non-rational. Coupling grounded theory to analyze speech patterns with relational ethics, we argue that teachers engaged in relational discourse that was reflective and social simultaneously. The collaborative blog served as a vehi…
An Ethos of Wander Time
Welcoming entanglements with ghosts
Posthumanist and antiracist thinkers contend that justice, as articulated by Karen Barad, demands response-ability to ghosts of the past and those yet to come. Normative conceptions of the child do not account for these ghostly engagements. When such normative conceptions direct a teachers’ gaze, the child speaking with ghosts may feel they too are not welcome. Without kinship and support grappling with the challenging, even painful, topics that …
Eavesdropping Books as Testimony
How do educators talk about trauma with young children? Specifically, how do they address children's secondhand experiences of crimes against humanity? In this article, Cara E. Furman argues that classrooms for young children must witness these experiences. A genre of picture books that Furman terms “eavesdropping texts” offer testimony that both witnesses and invites children's secondhand experiences of crimes against humanity. Here, Furman coup…
Rethinking Key Concepts in Education
How I Became a Better Teacher
How do we help teachers grow in accordance with their ethical ideals? Specifically, how do assessment practices fit within teachers’ sense of themselves as caring and professional early childhood educators? I pursue these questions by drawing on a collaborative blog. In doing so, I offer portraits of novice early childhood teachers as ethical agents committed to care and professionalism. I showcase how daily appeals to the developmental approach …
To Ask Questions of the Universe
A Handbook on Weaving and Unraveling
To be a teacher requires that one can weave and unravel pedagogy, drawing on previous understandings while constantly revising them in response to particular classroom circumstances. To do so is important, difficult, and frightening. Teachers therefore need experiences to help them prepare mentally for this work. In this essay Cara Furman argues that Jean‐Jacques Rousseau's pedagogical texts Emile, or, On Education and its sequel Emile and Sophie…
This child
In response to the abundance of parenting literature and a contemporary emphasis on expertise, recent scholars have suggested that how we parent should be determined by values and a family’s particular needs, a combination often referred to as practical wisdom. In this article, I build on previous calls for an ethical approach to being a parent. I argue that being able to share and cultivate one’s unique personality and have one’s aptitudes and i…
Striver·ish
Interruptions
Background/Context This paper is a part of the special issue “Reimagining Research and Practice at the Crossroads of Philosophy, Teaching, and Teacher Education.” We center what follows on a practice used in undergraduate methods courses that we have termed Interruptions. Interruptions are a form of inter-class visitation in which faculty plan together, visit one another's classes, and publicly interrupt the teaching of the other with a variety o…
Interruptions
Descriptive inquiry
This paper investigates how principals can be supported in their work as teacher leaders. My focus is on how principals can help teachers respond ethically to classroom challenges. I argue that in aiding teachers, school leaders themselves need support and ongoing development. I turn to the care of the self to conceptually explore ethical self-cultivation. I then argue that a practice, Descriptive Inquiry, serves as a way for principals to care f…
Fairies on the schoolyard
What does it mean for curriculum to be inclusive? This paper builds upon assertions that standardised, pre-determined curriculum marginalises students. This is especially harmful for students labelled with disabilities. I argue for an alternative approach to curriculum that is more fluid and inclusive than the traditional model. Describing this approach, I call on the image of a conversation: a discourse influenced by everyone, informal, and easi…
Hospitality
What does it mean for a teacher to welcome all children? This article explores this question by first documenting my own difficulty as an elementary school classroom teacher to welcome one particular child who had recently immigrated from a refugee camp. I explain how the theory of hospitality both addresses the failures of my own teaching and provides a framework for better instructional practices I drew upon with subsequent students. Specifical…
Interruptions
This article responds to what seems a nearly ubiquitous call for teachers to be reflective practitioners. Despite near consensus that self-reflection benefits the classroom teacher, teachers struggle to apply this work to daily life in the classroom. Specifically, using Donald Schön’s terminology, we find that successful teachers must reflect-in-action. We build on research that self-reflection must be built into preservice education and applied …
Ways of knowing
Early childhood writing curriculums typically focus on skills and encouraging interest. What children are asked to write is rarely closely examined. Through a self-study of my first and second grade classroom, in this paper I look at the implications of genre when teaching young children. I first identify some of the problems of a popular personal narrative curriculum and then showcase the ways that fiction can be more empowering for my students
Hospitality
What does it mean for a teacher to welcome all children? This article explores this question by first documenting my own difficulty as an elementary school classroom teacher to welcome one particular child who had recently immigrated from a refugee camp. I explain how the theory of hospitality both addresses the failures of my own teaching and provides a framework for better instructional practices I drew upon with subsequent students. Specifical…
Interruptions
Fairies on the schoolyard
What does it mean for curriculum to be inclusive? This paper builds upon assertions that standardised, pre-determined curriculum marginalises students. This is especially harmful for students labelled with disabilities. I argue for an alternative approach to curriculum that is more fluid and inclusive than the traditional model. Describing this approach, I call on the image of a conversation: a discourse influenced by everyone, informal, and easi…
Interruptions
This article responds to what seems a nearly ubiquitous call for teachers to be reflective practitioners. Despite near consensus that self-reflection benefits the classroom teacher, teachers struggle to apply this work to daily life in the classroom. Specifically, using Donald Schön’s terminology, we find that successful teachers must reflect-in-action. We build on research that self-reflection must be built into preservice education and applied …
Ways of knowing
Early childhood writing curriculums typically focus on skills and encouraging interest. What children are asked to write is rarely closely examined. Through a self-study of my first and second grade classroom, in this paper I look at the implications of genre when teaching young children. I first identify some of the problems of a popular personal narrative curriculum and then showcase the ways that fiction can be more empowering for my students
Interruptions
This article responds to what seems a nearly ubiquitous call for teachers to be reflective practitioners. Despite near consensus that self-reflection benefits the classroom teacher, teachers struggle to apply this work to daily life in the classroom. Specifically, using Donald Schön’s terminology, we find that successful teachers must reflect-in-action. We build on research that self-reflection must be built into preservice education and applied …
Descriptive inquiry
This paper investigates how principals can be supported in their work as teacher leaders. My focus is on how principals can help teachers respond ethically to classroom challenges. I argue that in aiding teachers, school leaders themselves need support and ongoing development. I turn to the care of the self to conceptually explore ethical self-cultivation. I then argue that a practice, Descriptive Inquiry, serves as a way for principals to care f…
Fairies on the schoolyard
What does it mean for curriculum to be inclusive? This paper builds upon assertions that standardised, pre-determined curriculum marginalises students. This is especially harmful for students labelled with disabilities. I argue for an alternative approach to curriculum that is more fluid and inclusive than the traditional model. Describing this approach, I call on the image of a conversation: a discourse influenced by everyone, informal, and easi…
Hospitality
What does it mean for a teacher to welcome all children? This article explores this question by first documenting my own difficulty as an elementary school classroom teacher to welcome one particular child who had recently immigrated from a refugee camp. I explain how the theory of hospitality both addresses the failures of my own teaching and provides a framework for better instructional practices I drew upon with subsequent students. Specifical…
Interruptions
Background/Context This paper is a part of the special issue “Reimagining Research and Practice at the Crossroads of Philosophy, Teaching, and Teacher Education.” We center what follows on a practice used in undergraduate methods courses that we have termed Interruptions. Interruptions are a form of inter-class visitation in which faculty plan together, visit one another's classes, and publicly interrupt the teaching of the other with a variety o…
Interruptions
A Handbook on Weaving and Unraveling
To be a teacher requires that one can weave and unravel pedagogy, drawing on previous understandings while constantly revising them in response to particular classroom circumstances. To do so is important, difficult, and frightening. Teachers therefore need experiences to help them prepare mentally for this work. In this essay Cara Furman argues that Jean‐Jacques Rousseau's pedagogical texts Emile, or, On Education and its sequel Emile and Sophie…
This child
In response to the abundance of parenting literature and a contemporary emphasis on expertise, recent scholars have suggested that how we parent should be determined by values and a family’s particular needs, a combination often referred to as practical wisdom. In this article, I build on previous calls for an ethical approach to being a parent. I argue that being able to share and cultivate one’s unique personality and have one’s aptitudes and i…
Striver·ish
Welcoming entanglements with ghosts
Posthumanist and antiracist thinkers contend that justice, as articulated by Karen Barad, demands response-ability to ghosts of the past and those yet to come. Normative conceptions of the child do not account for these ghostly engagements. When such normative conceptions direct a teachers’ gaze, the child speaking with ghosts may feel they too are not welcome. Without kinship and support grappling with the challenging, even painful, topics that …
Eavesdropping Books as Testimony
How do educators talk about trauma with young children? Specifically, how do they address children's secondhand experiences of crimes against humanity? In this article, Cara E. Furman argues that classrooms for young children must witness these experiences. A genre of picture books that Furman terms “eavesdropping texts” offer testimony that both witnesses and invites children's secondhand experiences of crimes against humanity. Here, Furman coup…
Rethinking Key Concepts in Education
How I Became a Better Teacher
How do we help teachers grow in accordance with their ethical ideals? Specifically, how do assessment practices fit within teachers’ sense of themselves as caring and professional early childhood educators? I pursue these questions by drawing on a collaborative blog. In doing so, I offer portraits of novice early childhood teachers as ethical agents committed to care and professionalism. I showcase how daily appeals to the developmental approach …
To Ask Questions of the Universe
Interruptions as collaborative grappling with time
Teachers face dilemmas of justice throughout their day that call for ethical decisions. Recent projects have focused on how teachers can be supported in making these decisions. In this paper we draw on practices in philosophy of education and math education to put forth our own method, Interruptions, for supporting teachers with the prosaic dilemmas of ethical teaching. After describing Interruptions and placing the method within a pre-service te…
Teacher talk in an early educator blog
This paper examines teacher discourse and the building of culture circles in an asynchronous collaborative blog that combined two different classes in an Early Childhood MS Ed program. Social speech is often considered non-rational. Coupling grounded theory to analyze speech patterns with relational ethics, we argue that teachers engaged in relational discourse that was reflective and social simultaneously. The collaborative blog served as a vehi…
An Ethos of Wander Time
Teaching for Human Dignity
Integrated Restatement
I know these two
Teaching for human dignity
How do we teach for human dignity in a context where life is, generally speaking, not treated as precious? How do we carve spaces for humanity amidst inhumane contexts? In this paper, five experienced teachers share how they work from the cracks to expand spaces for human dignity in their schools. They write and act as teacher-philosophers, dually considering it means to teach for human dignity and practically speaking how it can be done
Practical wisdom for ethical and effective teaching (of reading)
Today it happened. That moment I lived for as a first-grade teacher when a child spontaneously chooses to and can successfully read. At breakfast, my son glanced at a magazine on the table and slow
Finding Hope in Barbara Stengel’s Responsibility
The Confession‐Grade Exchange
This article tells the story of how an undergraduate future teacher, Jessie, gave an account of her hardships in the hopes of gaining a better grade. Responding to this episode, I name it a “confession‐grade exchange.” I then offer a descriptive account of grading, grading as an exchange, and confession as an exchange. Building from this analysis, I offer an ameliorative reframing centered on reciprocity and responsibility
Sociology (23 works) · Pedagogy (17 works) · Psychology (17 works) · Philosophy (10 works) · Law (9 works) · Mathematics education (9 works) · Political science (9 works) · Social science (9 works) · Computer Science (8 works) · Philosophy (7 works)