The website and the association that I chose is International Step by Step Association. Here is the link: http://www.issa.nl/.

This association focuses on promoting the equal access to the high quality education and care for all children, especially in the early years of their lives. It was established in the Netherland in 1999, and the core members are the 29 nongovernmental organizations. ISSA supports a wide range of programs that provide a comprehensive set of educational services and advocacy tools intended to influence policy reform for families and children, with a special focus on the years from the birth through primary school.

One thing caught my interest is the equal access section of this website. It talked about the Roma children in Europe who cannot have the equal access to the high quality education, and what the organization does to offer the high quality programs to those children, and they turn out to be the great students as others at the same age in the mainstream programs. When I was reading it, I realized that the difficult of accessing to the high quality education for minorities happens everywhere. Since the demographic changes and the cultural diversity, instead of burning the bridges for those people, we are supposed to build the bridges for those children to be involved in the mainstream society and education. We should consider the diversity in our teaching and programs to cater to the cultural diversity to make children and their families realize that they are respected and valued. We do not have to learn all sorts of different languages, but we can have the assistance from the people who speak the minority language to help us teach and know the children better in our class. One point which is significant to me, and it mentioned in the article too is the high expectations for all the children. Although more and more children in the classrooms are sharing various languages, we need to give the same high expectations for all of them to let children reach their full potential. I have experienced the high and low expectations for children with great language and cultural diversity. The children with high expectations from the teacher perform one year ahead of the others with the low expectations from the teacher. In this case, I learned that children’s potential is great, and as a teacher we should not have any bias to low our expectations for them. Children can learn the best under the teacher’s high expectation.

In this section, it also provides some suggestions for the early years teachers to teach effectively to the classes with the cultural and language diversities. For example, it encourages the multilingualism in early childhood education. In my current school, English is the official and teaching language, but Mandarin, Spanish, German, French and Korean are offered to the students as home language activities. Children can learn their home language by doing those activities twice a week to reinforce their home language skills. It points out the importance of training the new teachers to be familiar and flexible with the new situation that is the cultural and demographic diversities in the classrooms. Teachers should be proactive to the situation of the change in the classroom in the past 20 years. The curricula and programs should change according to the change of the students as well. 

after this week’s study, I noticed the difficult for the minority children and their families to access to the high quality education, especially to the early years education programs. At the same time, schools are facing the huge change of the demographic and cultural diversity in the world now. Not a single culture can dominant the school now. In this case, the curricula and the programs should adjust themselves to the new environment and situation in the world. We should be more open-minded to the children with a different culture or language background. We need to be the models for the students to see that we respect and value the children with diversities. Actually cultural diversity offers the teachers more resources and materials to make learning through fun.