Final assignment - Reflection

Over the past eight weeks we have been learning about a few of the issues and trends that are a part of the early childhood field.  We have learned from international websites as well as websites of local organizations.  Since I never made contact with an early childhood professional from another country, I spent time listening to the pod-casts and the from that experience I would have to say that the first thing I gained was some perspective.

The issues and trends we have here in the US are very different from some of the issues other countries face.  We may worry about hungry or poor children in out country but our children do not have to sell themselves to get money for their families.  We may want every child to have a safe, high-quality environment for our children to learn in but we do not have ten year old girls, afraid to walk home by themselves for fear of being raped because it is rumored that their bodies will cure AIDS.  We have issues of our own and they are important because we want what is best for our children, but I am grateful for those issues after seeing the issues other places around the world face.

Perspective, appreciation for our own issues here in the US, and lastly I would say my understanding of using other professionals in the field as resources has been deepened and solidified more in me after this class.  Just this past week I was at a party for my son's new soccer team and I met a woman who was from China and I actually saw her as a resource to help me develop more cultural awareness for a little boy in my class.  Her English was really good and she was gracious enough to help me understand a little bit about the Chinese culture.  If I had not taken this class I am not sure I would have viewed her as a resource and even talked to her about her culture.

A goal I would set for myself, related to the field, is to continue to learn from the resources we have used through this course.  These blog assignments seem like busy work at times but I am grateful to have the links posted here forever even after I have finished this class.

Thank you to those of you who read my posts and for the comments.  I look forward to seeing some of you in the next class!  Keep up the good work and good luck!

UNESCO - Week 7

This week I explored the UNESCO website.  UNESCO stands for United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization and the link to their site is:
http://www.unesco.org
I learned many things from this website.  As I looked under Early Education, the tabs that are there are Access, Quality, Investment and Governance which are some of the issues we have been learning about in this course.  A few specific things this site taught me that I did not know:

1 - In the developing world, 10.5 million children under 5 die from preventable diseases every year. (UNESCO)

2 - UNESCO believes that everyone has the right to an education and that education should not be a privilege that is only for a few.
3 - 69 million children are out of school world-wide


One major insight I have gained this week is that the issues about the field of EC that baffle me, also seem to baffle other professionals, not only in the US, but worldwide.  I feel I have so much more to learn but I am grateful for the many things this class has taught me.

Children's Defense Fund - week 6

The Children's Defense Fund website has many useful links.  This week I followed the "Take Action" tab.  Under this tab was suggestions for how to take action from your home or in your community.  Under the subtitle "Advocacy that Works", there are suggestions for how to advocate for children's policies that work.  Under this tab there are links with instructions on how to e-mail, call or send a letter to our elected officials.  If you keep following those prompts, they allow you to choose an issue and then they give you a template for a letter that you can personalize and then send to your senator.  I also am signed up for the newsletters but I did not receive one this week.

As far as our topic for this week of availability, accessibility and affordability of care, I was able to find a section called Early Learning Challenge Fund which is one of the CDF's policy priorities.  This website continues to be very informative and interesting.  I enjoy spending the time getting to know more about specific topics.  I am still pleased with this site as a choice.  The more I learn about this organization the more I like it and would want to be a supporter of it in the future.

Here's the link:

http://www.childrensdefense.org/

International Issues in EC

Having not heard from any professionals over seas, I was back to web research for international issues pertaining to Early Childhood.  After looking through the Harvard website on the developing child, I was drawn to an article focusing on a member of their faculty named Gunther Fink.  He is a health economist who was interested in discovering how the use of anti-malaria nets over time, may effect child development in Zambia.  In order to track the children's development, they needed to create new instruments of measurement because the methods used for measurement were not helpful in providing the information needed to see a result.

What was interesting to me also is that Gunther said at the end of the article that with out good information, they can not prove that they need funding.  This sounds similar to us here in the states.  We also may need to create new instruments of measurement as we continue forward and as the field here in the US changes and we try to balance play and academics for children in school.  As we grow and change over the next however many years, we will have to change many things.  First we have to change our thinking.  Once we do that, we can make the changes needed to truly benefit the children involved.

http://developingchild.harvard.edu/faculty_and_partners/faculty/faculty_spotlights/faculty_spotlight_fink/

Children's Defense Fund Research

While looking through the website I chose, http://www.childrensdefense.org/about-us/ I found a section called Early Childhood Education and Care.  Under that section, there is a link called Advocate and Family Resources and in that page there is a list of links that they call Early Care and Education Resources.  Under that page there is a link called Child Trends and when you follow that link, you get to http://www.childtrends.org/ which is a website full of current research of trends in the field of early childhood.  Some of the topics there are things like poverty, child development,education, child welfare and fatherhood & parenting to name a few.

This part of the Children's Defense Fund website is a great area for us as we go through this course.  I was also able to review briefly a few of the articles by the Children's Defense Fund and I did not find anything I would consider controversial.  The amount of information is a bit overwhelming but I am pleased with the decision I made to research this website over the next few weeks.

In my time reviewing the site I did not find much about economists or neuroscience but there was plenty about politics, legislation and policies.  I read about full-day Kindergarten and how the trend is changing to full day Kindergarten for all Kindergartners.  At the center where I work now, we offer the only full day Kindergarten in our town but the children who attend, are those who need full day care because of parents being at work.  These children often transition from the full-day day care setting that is run in another part of the building so the long day is not much of an adjustment for them.  I had not realized that having a full day Kindergarten program was going to be the trend for the future and that having a full day is so beneficial for children.  My daughter will probably go to a full day Kindergarten next year and because she is at my center with me now, I believe she will adjust easily to Kindergarten.  We will see!

Poverty - A Global Issue

After e-mailing many people from other countries, I still have only heard back from a few and those I heard from are not willing to correspond about the issues that face children in their countries.  So, I spent some time on the podcast website this week and though I did not listen to anything specific about poverty, I learned about How children think about thinking from George Forman from UMASS.  I also learned about the orphaned children from Indonesia as a result of conflict and the tsunami from Meridas Eka Yora.  I also learned about how young girls in Africa live in fear of being raped because it is thought that having intercourse with a young girl will cure you of HIV/AIDS from Deevia Bhana.  This World Forum Radio seems like a fantastic resource and even though I am disappointed that I have not made contact with anyone from another country, I am excited to continue to broaden my view through the use of these tools.


I also have not made contact with anyone from the podcast, so I completed the alternate assignment to review a country on the website http://www.childhoodpoverty.org/ .  The country I chose was China.  I actually was talking to my brother-in-law about China recently and we were talking about how we assumed that the country must be very polarized between rich and poor.  The website says that the poverty rate there in 2000 was actually only 3.7% according to their own statistics.  It also says that the poverty level is low compared to global standards so I researched current data at another website.  I simply checked on Wikipedia to see what information there was there.  According to Wikipedia, the poverty level in 2005 was less than 15% but the actual poverty line for them is $1.25 A DAY!!!  Seriously?  I read it a few times to be sure.  That was a surprise to me. 


Maybe $1.25 in china is enough to live on but that would not go far here in the US.  This week I had the opportunity to research poverty in my own community and it was a very eye-opening experience for me.  Poverty is a global issue and it is one I do not know if there will ever be an answer to.  All we can do is help where we can and be sure to be aware that people in need are all around us and it might not take much to help them out.

CDF week 2

As I mentioned in my last post, I chose the Children's Defense Fund after reading the mission statements of this group and many more.  As I was looking around on their website, I decided to start on the left of the site and click through in order so I could remember where I had been :)  First tab is "About Us" and at the bottom of this page, is a you tube video that made me cry at the same time as it made me proud to be in this field.

This is the link:  http://www.childrensdefense.org/about-us/

The recurring theme of their focus seems to be the voice for the children who can not speak for themselves and I love that.  I can totally identify with that because I believe as a preschool teacher, I do the same thing.  Some of my three year olds can not speak for themselves yet but they have a right to be defended and protected if need be.  As adults, we feel free to speak up when something is not okay but children, especially young children (in my opinion), may not possess the skills for speaking for themselves.

I am excited to look more into this organization and I hope I am not disappointed!

As an update on last week's assignment, I did hear back from one place I e-mailed in England but only to hear that they are really too busy to correspond with me at this time and then the woman gave me another place to e-mail which I did (three different people) and so far I got 1 out of office reply and that's it.  Looks like I may be doing the alternate assignment after all.  I'm kind of bummed.  Maybe something unexpected will happen.  We will see!