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.

Web Resources Sharing

The website that I have studied in the past weeks is called International Step by Step Association(ISSA).

The section that interests me the most lately is the section of the newest news in early childhood field. It shows the clear picture of the trends in this field, and issues that are closely related to this topic too. This week, when I was looking at it, one article caught my attention. It is about the new publication on diversity and social inclusion. The theme of the article is “All children and adults have the right to evolve and to develop in a context where there is equity and respect for diversity.” (ISSA) It addresses the importance of everyone in the early child care communities should be open-minded, be communicable, be respectful, and develop their own identity. I think it is really importance for the professionals in this field. If we want our children to respect the diversity, we need to be the good examples to show how we behave when we are dealing with the diversity issues. 

It also redefines the definition of diversity, competence. I would like to talk about the definition of competence that it mentioned in the article here, as I think it is a really good point. I used to think competence means someone has certain knowledge or skills to perform a task, now I know how narrow my thought was. In early childhood education, we want children to be competent which means we want children to gain the knowledge and skills that they can apply for the usage in their later life in a long term, and the quality of it depends on people working with children, families, and communities. Therefore talking about practitioners, competence is a continuous process that comprises the ability to build on and contribute to a body of professional knowledge, acquire both practical and reflective skills and develop a professional attitude. I am glad I can have a better understanding of what competence is, so I can integrate myself in the future. Learning is endless.

The website has the information of the meeting that ISSA hosts in Turkey to discuss about the quality in early childhood education field. All the members from 15 countries share their own ideas and concerns about the quality of early childhood education programs. They all agree that high quality early childhood programs need the politicians and economists to support. We need them to give more funds to this field to gain more resources, to train more qualified teachers, and to make early childhood education more accessible to every child in the world.

The trend that I have learned from the website is more and more professionals see the development of early childhood education as a mission of the whole nation. It is no longer just a task that a group people can handle. Children are the future of our country, we need support from various people, organizations, and communities to work together to make the early child care a right for every child, and make it affordable for parents.

References:

Diversity and Social Inclusion-Exploring Competences for Professional Practice in Early Childhood Education and Care. Retrieved from http://www.decet.org/fileadmin/decet-media/publications/Diversity-and-Social-Inclusion.pdf

http://www.issa.nl/index.html

The insights of poverty in India

I might have no luck at contacting my contacts, so I have to do the alternative for this assignment.
I visited the website www.childhoodpoverty.org and there are four countries in particular for me to choose from. Since I come from China, so I would like to know something else about some other countries. I chose to study India.
India has the second largest population in the world, but it is the home for the majority of poor people in Soutted  Asia too.
In the past five decades, India has tried various ways to eliminate the poverty in the country to meet people's basic needs, and the poverty line declined from 54.9%to an estimated 26%. However, India's social services are facing major challenges. A growing population, industrialization, and a globalizing economy are stretching the education system in India. It is getting harder and harder for them to provide effective and high quality education to children.

There are more or less 400 million people in India are between 0-18 years, and many achievements have been made in health and education for those children. However, India still has the largest number of working children in the world. Their living condition and health care should be paid more attention in the future.

The poverty situation differs from the state to state. Some states are really rich, so they do not have a severe poverty problem, but some states are struggling with the fight against the poverty. The gap between the rich and the poor is getting bigger. In India, they do not have enough middle class families to keep the balance of the society. It is kind of the dangerous for a steady developing country. The government is practicing the policies to create more job opportunities for citizens, paying more attention to the people in the poverty by offering them more education programs and the health care. The government has the anti property program which aims at increasing the rural employment, self-employment, and food subsidy program.

From all those, we can tell the India government is not dodging the problem of poverty, and they are doing their best to solve the problem.

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.