Consequences and Goals of the International Early Childhood Field

         

          According to NAEYC, one goal in the field of early education is for educators to utilize its organization as it proactively engages its international goal of empowering EC professionals with the standards, research-based resources, practitioner inputs, and shared values they will need to learn more about the innovative approaches that support high quality early learning throughout the world (NAEYC, website).

One anticipated consequence in this pursuit is for educators to become better informed, more aware of and more sensitive to the international issues and trends that affect children worldwide through its international news, podcasts and RSSs feed reporting. Another anticipated consequence is for educators to better serve the world’s young children and their teachers through its expanded resources, roles, content, expertise and offerings that support high-quality early childhood education across the globe and the last anticipated consequence for educators to continue to gain more knowledge, awareness and sensitivity towards diversity and culturally-appropriate practice issues through its continued practice of collaborating with other early education professionals around the world on its online discussion boards and its annual conferences now being held worldwide (NAEYC, website).

                                            Reference

http://www.naeyc.org/global

GETTING TO KNOW MY INTERNATIONAL CONTACTS – Part 3

          My three insights are taken from the UNESCO global news: UNESCO Regional Office for Southern Africa in collaboration with the Swaziland National Commission for UNESCO, is organizing a two-day Regional meeting on Early Childhood Care and  Education (ECCE)  under the theme “Ensuring Quality Early Childhood Care and Education” to be held in Mbabane, Swaziland, April 26 and 27.  The conference will be a platform for governments, private ECCE providers and development partners to share country policies, good practices, experiences, research results on ECCE and make recommendations to UNESCO on how to support its member states on issues regarding ECCE.

         

Senegal has decided to begin the process to ensure the establishment of a national open access policy and will be the first African country to establish an open access policy for accelerated development in the country. This positions Senegal as a leader in this area. Open access is the online availability of scholarly information to everyone, free of most licensing and copyright barriers to promote access to scientific knowledge. Open access helps to promote global knowledge exchange to contribute to scientific discoveries, innovation and socio-economic development and the result of this policy will encourage the creation of open platforms free and accessible for all researchers, innovators, teachers, students, media professionals and the public and will encourage collaboration, production, dissemination and knowledge economies. A conference on the open access movement and the future of Africa’s knowledge economy took place in Dakar at the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA) from March 30 to April 1, 2016 and during this conference, Senegal played a key role.

          UNESCO advocates for the Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE) program that addresses health, nutrition, security and learning for children’s holistic development. Improving children’s readiness to learn will result in less repetition and dropout at the later stages of education and it is therefore, important to exceed merely supporting children to survive rather, its goal is to support children so that they thrive! This is affirmed by the Kigali statement on education of Post 2015 which recognizes the right to access inclusive, equitable and quality education and to underscore the importance of ECCE, the issue of readiness of  children through participation in quality early childhood care and education with at least one year of free and compulsory pre-primary education is its goal.

Sharing Web Resources

Initially, I went to  NAEYC’s Global facebook page and clicked on 3 links I was not previously familiar with. First, I subscribed to NAEYC’s Children’s  Champion newsletter which will inform me of issues involving children from all over of the nation. Next, I clicked on a link that took me to NAEYC’s  Public Policy page and I learned 5 ways to advocate for Early Childhood—One, was the subscription sign-up for Child’s Champions newsletter; the other four were invitations to contact my  state representative on different issues and topics on  Advocating for children and their families.  This site was quite informative and I can’t wait to click it again on a daily basis to receive more advocacy information. Lastly, I clicked on a blog page and read an entry entitled “Chopsticks or Forks: Contextualizing Developmentally Appropriate Practice in a Global Age” written by Stephanie Olmore, the Senior Director of NAEYC’s Global Engagement (Olmore, 2016).

This blog entry was a mind-provoking lesson that sparked my curiousity and my imagination as I visualized:  1) how exciting it would be to visit a child care center in China;  2) how connected I would feel as I watched my peers while I  immerse myself into learning another culture’s daily practice such as eating with chopsticks;  and 3) compare the not-so-familiar practice of eating a meal with chopsticks to the more familiar daily practice of eating a meal with a fork and 4) reflect on the lesson learned from a new, non-english speaking child’s point-of-view using a developmentally appropriate practice lens (Olmore, 2016).

Stephanie said “I understand the deep effect culture has on learning and I

value individual approaches to learning” (Olmore, 2016).  Stephanie reminded me to put myself in a new child’s place, especially when that child is coming from another country or does not hear or speak the English language. This child and his family may not be familiar with American culture or customs but desires to learn and is fully capable.  I am reminded to use empathy, patience, be open to lots of expressions of individuality, be flexible, be authentic and further scaffold onto concepts. I enjoyed reading this global blog.

Reference

Olmore, Stephanie, (2016). Chopsticks or Forks: Contextualizing Developmentally Appropriate Practice in a Global Age. NAEYC Guest Blogger

Retrieved from http://www.naeyc.org/blogs/chopsticks-or-forks

Getting to Know Your International Contacts – Part 2

Last week, I wrote about millions of unsupervised children migrating from Mexico to other unfamiliar places (UNICEF, 2016)—one of them being the United States and I confirmed what I had learned about under-aged kids leaving Mexico. This week, my ear caught a news report of two teenaged Mexican boys with a large travel bag strapped over their shoulders as they were caught on video climbing over a 20-foot wall and landing safely on the ground. Now, as they were cautiously walking to cross the border, they suddenly spotted the video camera taping their every move. Within minutes, the boys quickly and ran back towards the wall and like a deer running for its life, they rapidly climbed back-up the wall and landed back-down in Mexico. My heart raced as they were headed back because I did not want them to caught but something tells me they will be trying to cross the border one day soon, again.  

Today, I am learning about The Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University and its Innovational Clusters project in Mexico. I learned what an Innovation Cluster is and how it operates. The Innovation Clusters are a cross-network of collaboration between researchers, model developers and site leaders and its goal is to co-design new strategies for addressing a specific unmet need within a population—an unmet need such as increasing the executive function skills in adult caregivers.  The new strategies are then tested at diverse pilot sites and the findings are shared across the innovation cluster to support each other’s work (Center, 2010).

The ongoing interaction between researchers and sites in an innovation cluste is now highly dynamic. Under the old conventional approach, reasearchers devoted considerable time and resources to proving that a single program is effective and they did not share the findings until after publication but the innovative cluster model allows researchers and practitioners to actively collaborate, continuously and data is shared right away in order to identify opportunities for immediate changes. In addition, the project team members work together to understand the implications of what they are learning work to understand who the intervention is working for and who it is not and why (Center, 2010).

I also learned why these Cluster are important to the field of Science. Clusters evolve, improve and build on one another’s findings over time—no two clusters look alike but most have multiple intervention pilot programs and have an interactive model that supports the design, implementation and evaluation of it’s multiple science-based ideas (Center, 2010).  

With what I’ve learned today, I am impressed by the concept of Innovation Clusters, its complexity and purpose in Mexico (Center, 2010). I am also fascinated by the question of who is funders this project and my hope is that their findings help other countries, including America. to gain more insight into helping all children succeed in school and in life in the near future.

References

Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University. (2010). Global children's initiative. Retrieved from http://developingchild.harvard.edu/about/what-we-do/global-work/  

http://www.unicef.org/infobycountry/media_68584.html