When I think of Research...

I have learned so much from this course that research is not that scary! Research requires lots of thinking on design, ethical consideration, confidentiality, validity, equity consideration and if it has significant value to the field. I never thought of how research could be unethical to participant in the process of getting a sample. 

At first, I thought research requires supports from scientist or at least professional with a doctoral degree to ensure the quality and validity of the study. I learned that this is totally wrong! Anyone could do any research! Research needs detailed planning and a specific hypothesis as a starting point, and then determines if qualitative, quantitative or mixed research methods should be implementing. Most importantly, we need to consider the ethical side as well to ensure all the procedures are ethic to all participants. 

While doing research in early childhood, it is easily to involve interviews or conduct observations on children. Researcher need to ensure the research should always consider having any methods in the child’s learning environments, such as their school or home. If it is observation-based research, it is critical to have the least disruption to the children’s learning opportunity. There is debate on how children should have to right to consent themselves to the research, but I believe children do not have the ability to understand the research. Therefore, we should always have parents or guidance consent to any research in early childhood. As an educator, I would love to support any research that could help our children; however, I would love to know the details of it- questions or procedures that children will go through. I believe an orientation in the family’s home language would help to make the parents understand the content better and feel more comfortable to release their child to the research.
 

Because "research" is a new topic to me even though I did a research paper in my previous degree, but I feel like this course is more in depth. One of the challenge I have was understanding the readings. Some of the readings seem easy to read, but the content is hard to understand. My little trick is to google search on some trusted website or scholar web site on the terms or concept that I am not familiar with. And by reading my colleagues' post helps a lot as well! 

As a result of this course, it helps me to reflect on the professional life in terms of if my practices is being equitable and ethical to all children. Am I being inequitable when I am thinking a child is being challenging because his behavior is little aggressive than others? I tried to use the term active children instead of children with challenging behavior sometimes, and use more positive description to describe the child’s behavior instead of labeling it.

Research Around the World

               I believe that there should never be a standard practice in early childhood education as the society changes and educators should adjust their practice to suitable to children’s need. I looked up the Early Childhood Australia (ECA)web site which is a well-known organization that is equivalent to the NAEYC organization in the US. It is a user friendly and resourceful web site with parent resources, publications, professional development resources and more. I like how they emphasize “ A voice for children” as their goal. They have their variety of publications for different audience- teachers, professionals, parents, administrators, such as Every Child Magazine, ECA Voice Newsletter, Australian Journal of Early Childhood, ECA code of ethic etc. ECA is also undertaking many projects to support and improve the field of early childhood. They are implementing the Quality Improvement Plans (QIPs) in school especially kindergarten and all day childcare, which is something that the US is putting more focus on now. I like how they have the "Parent Resources" tab on their home page so parents can easily navigate to what they want to know.

 

ECA published tons of publications every year, most of their journals share similar topics as the trends and issues that we have in our early childhood education field. They are also promoting play, adult guidance through play, language development and etc. These are some topics that caught my attentions:

·         Adult play guidance and children’s play development;

·         Teaching science through play;

·         Preschool teacher’s language use during dramatic play;

·         Promoting play for a better future

 

One of the biggest topics caught my eyes is the journal on Digital play in the early years: a contextual response to the problem of integrating technologies and play-based pedagogies in the early childhood curriculum (Edwards, 2013). There are always pros and cons about using technologies in the classroom, this article found that with contextual orientation, technology could better support teachers to engage children in the range of critical thinking skills.

 

It is an eye-opener to learn about other country's perspective on early childhood and is interesting to discover Australia has similar education approach to the U.S., with strong focus on children's play and progress.

 
Reference

Edwards, S. (2013). Digital play in the early years: a contextual response to the problem of integrating technologies and play-based pedagogies in the early childhood curriculum. European Early Childhood Education Research Journal, 21(2).