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).

 

Research that Benefits Children and Families—Uplifting Story

As we learned more about how research could be ethicial and unethical, we know that there are times that research could be impacting a child or the participant life while it may be the results could benefit to others. However, there are also great reserach samples that have positive effects on children and families. For example, the research “Preschool to kindergarten transition patterns for African American boys” (Iruka, Gardner-Neblett, Matthews, and Winn, 2014) was a great longitude study where the researchers start to collect data of selected groups from birth to the child attends  kindergarten. The procedure of this study was not harmful to children or families. It is a data collection method which the research give a questionnaire to the childcare providers or teachers about the child’s socio-emotional development during each visit from birth to kindergarten.  

The goal of this research is to gather informations on the patterns of African American boys transitioning into kindergarten based on their language, academic, and social skills collected in preschool and kindergarten. Moreover, they want to examine the extent of family socio-economic status, parenting and parent’s education level may affect their children.

Some of the findings in this research are:

• Family income and parent education were related to parenting processes and children’s academic and social skills with the exception of kindergarten social skill.
• Parenting practice (e.g. literacy practices) and interaction (e.g., cognitive stimulation) were positively associated with many child outcomes.
• Over 50% of African American boys in the study were either stable or showed marked improvements during their transition into kindergarten when families and teachers are working together (Iruka, Gardner-Neblett, Matthews, and Winn, 2014).
• Almost 20% of boys were struggling in their academic when the families are not working with the teacher and the teachers are not individualize their teaching style to fit each child’s need.

  I am excited to learn about this study as it is related to my work and something that I want to learn more about to support families. My program serves diverse population, and compare to other ethicity, African American families tend to have less parent involvement or participation in our program. We did workshops that they said they were interested in through the result from the parent survey, but their attendance is still low. It might be becaue most of them are single mother who needs to take care at least 2 or more children , so it could be challenging for them to involve in their child's learning without other supports. However, with these result, we can show parents that it is critical to actively involve in their child’s education and working with teachers together. As a program, we could think about other ways to support these families to increase their willingness or abilities to support their child by maybe provide parenting workshops and childcare supports while they are in the workshops. It make a huge difference to a child’s life when they receive the mutual supports from home and school.

Referece

Iruka, I., Gardner-Neblett, N., Matthews, J.C., and Winn,D. (2014). Preschool to kindergarten transition patterns for African American boys. Early Childhood Research Quarterly 29 (2), 106-117. Retried from http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0885200613001075

The Beginning of My Research Journey

                My passion is always in supporting cultural diversity in the early childhood field. As our society became more diverse, there is no doubt that racism and inequality exist along with the growing diverse population. As an early childhood educator, I believe we have a responsibility to provide a positive environment to support children to success. In additionally, it is important for educator to support this new trend of growing diversity population by helping children to learn and appreciate their identity while respecting other cultures. 

I am a true believer of play-based environment and believe that children learn the best in a secured environment that they are familiar with. The story that I am going to bring, push me more to promote diversity in the classroom. I had a Hispanic student, Osmar (fake name) who just moved from Mexico less than a year, he was a very social and happy boy always likes to ask questions and use his limited English vocabulary to communicate with his peers and teachers. In the second year, because of father’s job, the whole family needs to move to a different county. One day, Osmar’s mother called me and crying for help. She said Osmar did not talk as much now after he moved to a new preschool and Mom did not feel welcomed in the school. Mom expressed that the classroom has a very academic  setting which she somewhat like in the beginning, but later on she felt something wrong with the classroom as she does not see anything that she could relate to. Osmar does not speak much because the teacher does not encourage him to express himself. Mom felt like the teachers are not being patient with him as he is learning English. I helped Mom to find other school that value diversity but because it was almost the end of school year, there was no vacancy.  

This is a sad story, which also stimulates me to learn more about how a cultural diverse classroom supports children from diverse population. The research chart from last week’s assignment reduced my stress about research. A quality research should have a clear title for each key paragraph or task such as participant, methods, discussion etc. It helps audience to better understand the research and easier to find the information that they want to know. 

I am still learning how to narrow down my subtopics to make it measurable and wondering if my revised subtopic of “how a a cultural diverse classroom supports children from diverse population” is clear and measurable? Perhaps, the research could measure a classroom promote diversity and compare with a classroom who only focus on academic? I would really appreciate if anyone could share any article they know would support my research. Good luck everyone on your research!

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.