Featured Speakers
The Power of Prevention: Ensuring the Success of Each and Every Child in Our Early Childhood Spaces
Early childhood settings are where children learn important skills such as being a good friend, helping others, using strategies to calm down when feeling big emotions, and taking care of themselves, others and their environment. Unfortunately, when children don’t have these skills, they are at risk of being excluded from the very environments where they were likely to learn the skills. Once children are excluded, it can set them on a trajectory of poor school outcomes. However, we can prevent this by designing early childhood programs that provide high quality learning experiences, nurturing and responsive relationships, and consistent and predictable routines. Dr. Hemmeter will talk about the power of prevention with the goal of ensuring each and every child has the support they need to be meaningfully included in our early childhood settings.
About the Speaker
Dr. Mary Louise Hemmeter is a professor of Early Childhood Special Education at Vanderbilt University and holds the Nicholas Hobbs Chair in Special Education and Human Development. Her research focuses on effective instruction, supporting social emotional development and addressing challenging behavior, and coaching teachers. Dr. Hemmeter conducts presentations and workshops throughout the U.S. and abroad. She has directed numerous multi-site projects funded by the US Departments of Education and Health and Human Services. Through her work on the National Center on the Social Emotional Foundations for Early Learning and IES-funded research projects, she was involved in the development of the Pyramid Model for Supporting Social Emotional Competence in Young Children and the Practice Based Coaching Model. She is a co-author on the Connect4Learning Early Childhood Curriculum, the Teaching Pyramid Observation Tool, and the Teaching Pyramid Infant-Toddler Observation Scale (TPITOS). She was co-editor of the Journal of Early Intervention and President of the Council for Exceptional Children’s Division for Early Childhood. She received the Merle B. Karnes Service to the Division Award and the Mary McEvoy Service to the Field Award.
Early Relational Health: Championing Everyday Connections and Communities of Care
Early Relational Health (ERH) is an emerging concept that organizes our cumulative understanding of the foundations of children’s and adults’ health, well-being, and development in a way that is inclusive (not limited to any one profession), reciprocal (caring for both children and the adults), and fundamentally rooted in relational human experiences. Can we recognize early care and education as an essential part of the early relational experiences for children and their families? How and why does this matter, for both children and the adults who care for them? How do we lift up our providers as early relational health professionals alongside disciplines like pediatrics, home visiting, mental health, and others? This closing keynote presentation is an invitation to explore these questions and to reflect on why our collective work matters, as part of a multidisciplinary community of Early Relational Health practitioners.
About the Speaker
Emily Meland is the Co-Director of Simple Interactions, a nonprofit whose mission is to encourage, enrich, and empower human interactions around children and their helpers. She works with child-serving professionals across various developmental contexts, creating opportunities for adults to see and talk about how they interact with children and youth in their daily work. Emily’s work also focuses on communicating the science and practice of human interactions through the lens of Early Relational Health to advocate for positive systems of change that support both adults and children in the communities where they live, work, and grow.
Emily is an Adjunct Lecturer and doctoral researcher at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE). Her research and practice focuses on supporting educators to foster children’s social, emotional, and cognitive development in ways that honor and sustain their unique strengths, cultures, and backgrounds. She teaches courses on empowering human relationships across developmental contexts along with facilitating adult learning and professional development.
Emily serves on the Board of the Medford Family Network and has consulted for a variety of nonprofit and philanthropic organizations, including Sesame Workshop, the non-profit behind the children’s television show Sesame Street. Her research has been published in Frontiers in Psychology and Social Emotional Learning: Research, Practice, and Policy.
Emily received her Master’s in International Education Policy from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and an A.B. in Social Anthropology from Harvard College. Most importantly, she is Mom to two little ones, Theo and Henry, who are her greatest teachers.