Leadership

Dianna Babcock, Director of Sing Play Learn with MacPhail® & Instructor has worked in the Sing Play Learn with MacPhail® department since 1990. For 30 plus years, she has been an early childhood educator and teacher in the Twin Cities area in various settings, including preschools, daycare centers and of course at MacPhail.

Dianna has a Bachelor of Arts in music and psychology from Monmouth College and the University of Minnesota, with an emphasis in child psychology, and a Masters of Education in Early Childhood Education with a Pre-K licensure from the University of Minnesota.  She frequently conducts early childhood music workshops at conferences and early learning programs throughout the Midwest.

As a teacher, Dianna’s goal is to make sure each individual child is engaged and learning. Providing learning through the media of music, Dianna says, enhances brain development, promoting social, emotional, cognitive, language, creative and physical development.

Dr. Ellie Brown is a Professor of Psychology in the College of the Sciences and Mathematics at West Chester University, where she directs the Early Childhood Cognition and Emotions Lab (ECCEL). She is internationally recognized for her scholarship on children in poverty, as well as her research on arts programming. The leading journal Early Childhood Research Quarterly published her 2010 paper on “Arts Enrichment and School Readiness”, her 2013 paper on “Arts Enrichment and Preschool Emotions.”, and her 2017 paper “The Art of Head Start.” The leading journal Child Development published her 2017 paper, “Can the Arts Get Under the Skin.”

Dr. Brown served as the Early Childhood Research Expert for the NEA/HHS Joint Convening on the Arts and Human Development and her work was highlighted as model research in the associated NEA/HHS white paper framing a research agenda for the arts. Her scholarship on arts programming is featured in the books Learning from Head Start: A Teachers Guide to School Readiness (Guilford, 2013) and Learning Across the Early Childhood Curriculum (Cohen & Waite-Stupiansky, 2013).

Dr. Brown and her team of researchers at the Early Childhood Cognition and Emotions Lab (ECCEL) are dedicated to making sure all children grow up in cognitive and emotional environments that promote their flourishing. Dr. Brown and her son, Max enjoy engaging in music and other arts activities together.