The summary of learning this course

  The consequences of learning about early childhood field in this course are as following.

First, I start to think and consider the issues and the trends in a broader way. I used to keep my eye on the students in the class and in the school, and I did not have the international picture of the trend in early childhood education. Now I know the class and the school that I am working at is just a miniature of the global trend. There are many nations are having the same issues and trends as we do, and they have got their own solutions to the issues. Most of solutions can be used to solve the problems that we are having in early childhood as well. There are many researches done in this area to give suggestions to help early childhood professionals to deal with the issues in this field. I have realized that I have so many resources that I can refer to to support my teaching and myself development. 

Second, I will pay a closer attention to those ELL families. I learned the barriers that a migrant family may have in this course. I have many ELL families in my class. I start to figure out more ways to communicate with them to ensure that they know they are welcome to come to talk to me, to visit school, and to ask any questions or concerns that they may have. I believe it is really helpful for me to build up the positive relationship and partnership with parents. Helping families engage in children’s school life is one of the key points to support children’s development in early childhood.

Third, I need to be a life long learner. It is easy to say, but hard to do. I need to keep myself updated to the trends and issues in early childhood field, if I want to serve children best. Early childhood field is totally different from what it was 20 years ago. If we still treat and teach children the way that we were taught, it is not going to work out in nowadays. Children are different, the information that they can access to is different, and the way they grow up is different. We have to make sure that who we are teaching, which means we need to be learning and be trained regularly to have enough knowledge of the nowadays. 

Since we are here to learn more knowledge and resources about serving in early childhood field. I should say I have met so many wonderful colleagues here, and I would like to keep in touch with them in the future as we can help each other and share the experiences and resources based on the same understanding of the importance of early childhood education. We also can share our observations and new insights that we gained in this field with each other to keep ourselves updated.

More things about my professional goals

I had a thorough read of the website  http://www.unesco.org/new/en/education/themes/strengthening-education-systems/early-childhood/quality/. I found a couple of things that are related to my professional goals.

First of all, it has a section about quality in early childhood education. There is an article talking about the language in Papua New Guinea. I am the person who respects and values the diversity in my community, and in this article, it talks about the education reform in PNG. The official language in this country is English, but there are only 50,000 people use English as their first language, while 5.2 million people living there. PNG is the world’s most linguistically diverse nation. Government has realized the problem, and the education reform has started too. The key elements of PNG’s education reform are the encouragement of early education in the vernacular languages and a gradual bridging to English as a language of wider communication. It also includes the development of a culturally relevant curriculum and materials. It emphasizes on the importance of teaching vernacular language in the formal education system, especially in early years education. I believe it shows the great respect to the minority groups in the country, which is good for the country’s development. Once people in the country feel they are respected and valued, they will be more open-minded to accept new languages and things. People also can reintegrate themselves back to their villages’ education system if they fail in the secondary entry exam. I should say this is a great step for PNG, the authority shows the respect to the diversity in the nation. I think all the other nations with many minority groups can refer to what PNG does to consolidate the education in their nation to make more people feel respected and valued.

The second insight that I have gained from this website is about the curriculum. When I said that I would like to be a life long learner to provide high quality teaching to children, in this website, I found something new to me too. We used to design our curriculum about early childhood education very detailed, and we put emphasis on the content and cognitive goals, now it summarizes the key points of being a good program. It is more like a concept based guidelines instead of a content based one. I think in this way, it gives teacher more space to try out various teaching methods to apply to their teaching and adjust the ways of teaching according to children’s age and learning progress.

The third insight I have gained is about the workforce in early childhood education. There is a demand of qualified teachers, but there are challenges to get those teachers too. Early years teachers are not respected as a professional as other professionals, so many experienced teachers move to a different career. They are not payed well, and they do not get enough training to integrate themselves. Those make the high quality of early childhood education is so hard to reach. No qualified workforce makes high quality education impossible. Therefore, many people have realized the importance of certified workforce in early childhood education, but who is going to pay for their training, salary resources and so on is another question to be answered. Early childhood education is becoming more and more popular in all countries, but the quality of curriculum and the professionals are the big concerns in the communities.

Sharing more resources

http://www.issa.nl/index.html is the website of International step by step association. I keep exploring in this resource this week, and I have another look at those two following links too. One is http://globalchild.org/new/, and the other one is http://www.earlychildhoodnews.com/.

When I was going through the first website, I know the mission of the organization to to help children who suffer from the war, the violence, or the natural disasters to have access to education,  and health care. I am very interested in what they do. They have different programs to help children around the world in various ways. They have summer camp for children with a safe and healing environment. They also have the programs to offer enough high quality opportunities for play, creative self-expression and friendship. Children from the suffer, most of time, feel unsafe, violent, defensive, and cold, but the aim of the programs and camps that they are holding is to let participants live and learn alongside one another in a safe, nurturing environment, hearts, minds and souls are opened to understanding, trust and hope. 

When I was exploring the above website, I started to think and reflect on the current situation. As a teacher in early childhood field, we need to be observant to know our children, and we are responsibly to help children if they have any difficult times. The high quality education is not only about academic performance, but also about the emotional attentional that children are gained. We need to support children to develop healthily physically and mentally. Those are the two important elements of a high quality program.

The other website that I explored is about all the newest news about early childhood. It has news section for us to know the information of this field, it has teaching ideas section to give teachers some inspiration in their teaching, and it has resources section too. I found a very good article about diversity in this website. It tells me what diversity is, and what is not. It is not a curriculum, not a lesson plan, not Chinese New Year, not a dress up time. It is more about making sure children can learn about their own backgrounds and the backgrounds of people who are different from them, and see themselves, their families, and their communities represented throughout the center. At the same time, children are supposed to be exposed to activities, materials, and concrete experiences that destroy stereotypes. The last important thing about diversity is to make sure children learn to enjoy, appreciate and seek out differences. It also gives many other ideas of how to make diversity learning happen in the classroom and the curriculum. What’s more, it also suggests the activities that we can do about diversity in our communities. I think this is a brilliant article. I like this link a lot.

References:

http://www.earlychildhoodnews.com/default.aspx

http://globalchild.org/new/

Francis Wardle Diversity in Early Childhood Programs http://www.earlychildhoodnews.com/earlychildhood/article_view.aspx?ArticleID=548

New insights

I studied the website Center on the Developing Child. From the learning in this course, I know the relationship between early childhood education and the country’s future economic prosperity. The center aims at using science to enhance child well-being through innovations in policy and practice. 

Scientific facts can be the most powerful tool to explain to policymakers, professionals, and parents about the importance of healthy development for a young child. Most of time, I would like to talk and share the things from my experiences, and now I know more and more people and organizations are advocating to explain early childhood educational field in a more scientific way. The center is committed t building a unified science of health, learning and behavior, leading the design, implementation, and evaluation of innovative program and practice models, catalyzing the implementation of effective, science-based public policies, and preparing future and current leaders to build and leverage knowledge. Above are the commitment that the center wants to do in general.

The center also focuses on the developing countries, like African countries, and Asian countries. When we talk about all the wonderful resources and practices, most of those happen in developed countries, and the voices that we often hear are from those countries too. All the children in the world have the equal right to access to early childhood education, and they should have the right to grow up in a healthy and safe environment. However, they are so many countries are suffering from diseases, natural disasters, and poverty. All those make early years education difficult to be practiced in those countries, as they do not have resources or budgets to take care this area. The center cares about children in those countries too.Recently the center has lunched Global Children’ Initiative which focuses on three strategic objectives. First, they want to reframe public discourse about the early childhood period by educating high level decision makers. Then they would like to support innovative, multidisciplinary research and demonstration projects in selected countries to expand global understanding of how healthy development happens.And the last objective is to build leadership capacity in child development research and policy among individuals and institutions in low-and middle-income countries.

They lunched many different projects in many other countries to help them fight against their own issues. For example, the center has a project in Zambian to help children there fight against malaria. The project started in 2009, and it is an ongoing one. The collaborators of this project hope the effort that they made can improve the understanding of child development in this context, and also can help identify key interventions towards improved outcomes in a rapidly changing developing world.