Insight and Goals

I really enjoyed learning new information and other country’s early childhood field from my international contact, Ms. Yu. I appreciate her honesty and passion to her career and to the children and families.

  

One thing that I learn from Ms. Yu is to think outside of the box when supporting children and families. For example, she would not mind to do home visit to learn more about the immigrant families, which was not required by the school. A responsible educator would take extra steps to learn about the child’s family background, as it is where children learn and develop their attitude and values. Therefore, it is vital to learn about the cultures, values and background of the family we serve. I would encourage my teachers to learn about the families by doing icebreaker game in the family meeting and prepare set of questions to get to know the families.

Secondly, from the conservation with Ms. Yu, I learned that in order to provide equity education to children, we have to be very sensitive to the child’s need and the family’s need as well. Since we are not familiar with other’s cultures, our perspective to the values and needs of others may not suitable to the actual needs of the families. For example, some families may not feel their culture is represented in the classroom when teacher already put books and toys reflected to the cultures. Hence, to ensure the environment reflect to the culture we serve, teachers and director needs to communicate with families to understand how their cultures and how we could provide a secure environment to make them feel comfortable.   

Lastly, I would like to keep up with the research related to early childhood education to enhance my knowledge and support my team. Ms. Yu inspired me to keep up with the latest research when she talked about how she aware of Hong Kong does not support children’s social emotional development but she learned about it from other country’s research. Educators should also learn the childhood development perspective and research from other countries to enrich their knowledge, which they may find new findings or good strategies that may beneficial to their own professional development or their career.

                I believe that racism and inequity happens everywhere in the world, children are innocent and they do not learn bias if they never expose to one or experience it. We cannot control bias outside of our area, but we could control our environment such as school and home to promote equity and acceptance. Globally, we should have a discussion forum to share ways that we promote anti-bias and equity in the early childhood field. Moreover, I believe in inspiration, we should also share success stories of how we promote equity make a difference in a child or family’s life.

Getting to Know Your International Contacts—Part 3

        

My professional partner, Ms. Yu, expressed that the issues regarding quality and early childhood professional in Hong Kong, China, are the opportunities for continue professional development and quality care in low-income population. In the last conversation we had Ms. Yu expressed that there are growing numbers of immigrant moving to Hong Kong who speak different dialect than Hong Kong people. These immigrants are poor and they moved to Hong Kong because of the free public education that they provide. Hong Kong currently do not have any support system to support teachers or not much resources to support these immigrant families to adopt to their society.   

Ms. Yu expressed that Hong Kong is a fast pace city and very competitive. Although she tries to put her curriculum into play-based and inclusive for the immigrants to feel more secured, her school does not support her much. Their education system focuses more in academic than the developmental progress of the child. Some of Ms. Yu’s professional goals are to advocate for the importance of children’s social-emotional needs and to advocate for new immigrant’s right. However, their professional development usually is related to academic and not how to support the child to build confident or social-emotional needs such as strategies on how to make curriculum to support children in mathematical skill, critical thinking etc.  


 
 Ms. Yu said she is positive to the education system in Hong Kong  and believe that the government will develop more supportive resources for new immigrants and professional development for teachers in the near future. However, she think that a professional development to help teacher recognize their values and/or equity sense is important. If a teacher do not value equity or being bias, it will effect children’s values which will affect their values and attitude toward others too. 

      



 I really appreciate Ms. Yu’s honesty and willingness to share her thoughts regarding Hong Kong’s education system and her goals. Interestingly, I have similar goal and beliefs as her. I believe that teacher’s commitment is the most valuable and important element to inspire children and their families. If a teacher do not have confident on a child, the child and their family would feel it and it may effect the child. On the other hand, if a child fails or fall behind other’s progress, but the teacher is encouraging and trusting the child could do it,

Sharing Web Resources- Part 2

I chose the Childcare aware of America web site to explore further. Child Care Aware of America is the nation leading voice for childcare who works with state and “local Child Care Resource and Referral agencies and other community partners to ensure that all families have access to quality, affordable child care” (NACCRRA, 2014). They have ongoing projects to increase quality and availability of child care, comprehensive training to child care professionals, research, and advocate for child care policies to improve the lives of children and families.  There are many sessions in the web site: about us, connect with us, about child care, news, program & services, public policy, conferences, publications and storefront. 

I chose the “about child care” session and found the important resources for child care such as the State Child Care Licensing session showed some basic licensing requirements- licensing, background checks, child/staff ratios, and etc. Other important resources: State Child Care Fact sheets & state information, child demographics, cost of child care, poverty, quality matters, school-age matters, school readiness, supply, workforce and parent perspectives. Each of these session contains resources, links, reports that related to the topic. I particularly like the quality matters topic because it contains reports and links help families to understand the importance of quality care and how the Quality Rating Improvement System (QRIS) works. This resource helps families to choose quality care also help professionals to improve their child care. 

Zero to Three, National Center for Infants, Toddlers, and Families, also is a very resourceful web site that I have been following. It provides many topic related to child care quality, resources for parents such as how to find quality care and resources to find popular child care in your local area (Zero To Three: National Center for Infants, Toddlers, and Families, 2012a). They also provide links for parents to find affordable child care. I would continue to follow this web site as it has so many resources supporting parents in parenting. 

References

National Association of Child Care Resource & Referral Agencies (2014a). Retrieved from: http://www.naccrra.org/about-us

Zero To Three: National Center for Infants, Toddlers, and Families (2012a). Retrieved from http://www.zerotothree.org/early-care-education/child-care/

Getting to Know Your International Contacts—Part 2

My international contact is a primary teacher, Ail Yu, from Hong Kong, China. Ms. Yu brought up a very interesting issue currently happens in Hong Kong, racism among Chinese group. Hong Kong is a urban city located China, their primary language is Cantonese. Recently thousands of immigrants from mainland China from the rural city send their children to study in Hong Kong or immigrant to Hong Kong. However, because Hong Kong is a small city, the education system did not have sufficient space to take extra students.  In additionally, those immigrants came from variety of county, which speak different dialects than the primary language spoken in Hong Kong. Thus, teachers do not understand the languages the student speaks and there were no support/ resources to support these immigrant groups. Racism between students exists as most of the media and parents were not supporting new immigrant enter to this city.

                I was little surprise that there were racism between people from the same roots, however, as I reflect more, racism exists between class, society status, sexual orientation etc. Ms. Yu expressed that she tries to understand the immigrants families by meeting with the parents and do home visits even it was not required by the school. She learned that immigrant families were living in poverty and parents expressed that they always face unfair treatment in daily bases. Ms. Yu also learned that because the cultural difference, Hong Kong people do not understand or agreed of the behavior/ habits of the immigrant. When the parents do not agree the immigrant’s behavior, they may stereotype immigrants into a category and unconsciously educate their child this stereotype. Therefore, children may hold these thoughts to school, which easily proceed to racism/ bully at school.  

It reminds me of the English Learners in the United States that the education system do not have sufficient resources or system set up to support teachers to support English Learners. In additionally, some parents may stereotype people who came from other countries and consciously or unconsciously educate the negatives to their children, which affect the child’s impression to those cultures or people. I do not blame on those parents who stereotype other cultures, because sometimes it is the media and our experiences influence our impression. As an educator, we do not have the power to change someone’s mind, we can at least have a positive mindset toward diverse cultures.