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.