Practicing Awareness of Microaggressions

This week I heard my colleague comment on a child’s behavior that involved microaggressions. During our conversation about work, she expressed that she has an African American boy in her classroom with challenging behavior such as not listening to her, climbing furniture, and hitting other peers. She said “You know Black children are like that, and they don’t listen to adults and very active”. Although she was sharing her feeling with me, her comment made me uncomfortable. Fortunately, she did not share this with the family or in front of the child. I do not like her comment as it contains microinsult assuming stereotype of African American children are active and play rough. I think all children have their moments of not listening, climbing furniture and playing roughly. Her comment maybe unintentional, the way she generalized all African American children as active and rough is not appreciated and contain bias viewpoint. As a teacher, she needs to think of ways to support the child. First she should understand this child’s need by sharing her observation with the family and ask them if that happens at home and how would they handle it.

        The articles this week helped me to reflect on my perception or stereotypes lens on others. I found that sometimes I do assume a child’s behavior or family using stereotypes, but I quickly remind myself that everyone is different and should never generalize a person using stereotypical points of view. n. We could also promote anti-bias curriculum in early childhood education field as a startup to help children learn about difference and continue this kind of education on to middle school. We could also have this kind of reflection lesson in High School or earlier, to teach children to help children reflect on their experience to prevent microaggressions. Microaggressions could be intentional and unintentional, yet all micoagressions made the target feel intimidated and discriminated.

Perspectives on Diversity and Culture

For this assignment, I talked to my Filipino friend, Chinese American cousin, and my Chinese colleague at work regarding cultures. Interestingly they all have similar perspective of cultures and understanding of diversity. My colleague who came from China and the Filipino friend who is not born in the US think that people generalize their cultures in certain ways and these stereotypes did not reflect to their “deep” culture.  Many of their origin cultures they have in hometown sometimes unconsciously discontinue after living in the US for a long time. One example of culture discontinuity is my Chinese colleague was used to celebrate Lunar Year (Chinese New Year) in the past and will take a day off to go to visit relative and gather. But because most of her Chinese friends or families did not celebrate this occasion anymore, so she did not want to continue this culture. She said one year she brought her children to China and brought her to see the dragon dance in the Chinese New Year Parade, go to the flowers market etc. to experience the traditional way of Chinese New Year.  Her children were very excited and learned a lot about Chinese cultures from this trip. Moreover, they both expressed that the location of where you live in your country influence your cultures. People live in the urban maybe more educated and their culture is different than people live in the rural area.  They both think that diversity meant people come from different countries or have different skin color. 

  On the other hand, my Chinese American cousin think culture only related to nationality. He thinks if you are Chinese, you will live in Chinese culture, if you are Chinese American then you have mixed cultures with Chinese and American, and this applies to all ethnicities. He thinks cultures are traditional practice your ethnicity developed and accumulated from their ancestors and pass on to the next generation. He also thinks diversity represent the person’s skin color or nationalities. 

This is a very interesting assignment to get to know more about my colleague, friend and cousin. It is more interesting to know how  people grow up in different countries have different perspective than people born and live in where they are living now. It seems like as people move out from their home town, they also bring in their culture and perspective to the new town, so they will see the difference of culture and diversity. However, for people who live in the same town where they grow up may not understand the diversity and culture differences are more wide and deep than just food, music, books, literacy etc., but more into day-to-day life. I learned that we cannot assume a person’s culture by where they are form or how they defined themselves. If we want to know about their “deep” culture, it takes time to observe and learn. Most importantly, we should always remain neutral perspective when we learn other about other cultures and diversity.  

My Family Culture

 This week assignment we need to image if we were in a major catastrophe and need to evaluate to other countries, what are the three items that we hold dear and that represent our family culture.  

 First, I would say my family album as it contains all the memories that we have as a family. These pictures show every moment of our family culture, and it also helps to explain our family culture to my future children. 

 

The second items I will bring is a watch, we all self-conscious and punctual like to have a watch like us everywhere we go to know the time. We will explain to others that we value and enjoy every moment we live in, therefore, knowing the time is important to us.  

 The last item I will bring will be a laptop because I could use my laptop to play our favorite music, communicate with other with the translation software, and can document our new life in the computer. Music is a universal language, we can tell the mood of the music by its rhythm. I believe I maybe able to communicate with others about my feeling by using the song from my home language. 

I would be frustrated if I could only keep one personal item upon arrival because it is hard to live without my watch and laptop. However, I would appreciate to have my family album with me as it is very meaningful and memorial to remind me my home country and family culture. 

As an immigrant myself, I understand how it is like to live in a country that has different cultures and language than where I am from. This assignment helped me reflected on my family culture. It is hard to think of an item that represent my family culture is hard to define. However, photo represent a million words, so now I would try to capture any memorial moment of my family time.  This assignment also reminded me that how overwhelming it could be for a young child coming from other country to stay in a room with children who speak different language than him/ her or may have different colors than him/ her. It is something the teachers should do to prepare an environment that include and welcome diverse children and families.  

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).