Reflecting on the International Early Childhood Field

Over the past several weeks, I have had the opportunity to learn about the field of early childhood education from a global perspective. I was excited to have the opportunity to communicate with early childhood professionals from other areas of the world, but quickly discovered that the seemingly easy task was rather difficult to accomplish. I plan to continue to try to search for other early childhood professionals from outside of the United States so that I can further explore the field from a different perspective. 

One of the insights that I have gained throughout this course was that there is a strong passion for offering quality early childhood programs to children that is shared all around the world. I saw this passion directly when reading the news articles provided by UNESCO's Early Childhood and Care webpage (http://www.unesco.org/new/en/education/themes/strengthening-education-systems/early-childhood/). I was excited to see that even though we may come from different cultural backgrounds, we as educators strive to provide quality education to all children in the early years. 

I also learned that poverty-related conditions are not limited simply to third world countries, where poverty is highly emphasized. Poverty is seen all around the world and impacts millions of children each year (http://www.childhoodpoverty.org/). As a result, children are faced with the task of fighting the effects of poverty instead of focusing on being a child and enjoying the basic benefits of childhood that many people take for granted. Children experiencing poverty lack the opportunity to participate in early childhood programs, which can often lead to poor educational performance throughout their childhood. If these children are denied access to early childhood programs because of their "quality of life" status, how are they supposed to overcome the barriers necessary for them to ultimately progress beyond poverty?

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Another insight that I gained over the past several weeks was that professional development is key to improving the quality of early childhood programs around the world. I am a strong believer in staying up to date with current trends and issues in any career field, but educators around the world agree that this is a necessity in order to maintain early childhood programs. In Turkey, the ACEV provided professional development opportunities to assist their teachers in learning how to help needy families access assistance programs throughout the country (http://www.acev.org/en/anasayfa). 

As I mentioned earlier, one goal that I have is to continue to try to initiate and maintain contact with early childhood professionals from around the globe. I think that it would be a great way to learn about early childhood programs from other parts of the world and see if there are any practices that we can put in place here in the United States. In the meantime, I will continue to explore the websites that I have listed in the past weeks to continue to learn about current practices and issues happening in the field. 

Getting to Know Your International Contacts - Part 3

This week, I reviewed the World Forum Radio podcast featuring TJ Skalski (http://worldforumfoundation.org/wf/wp/current-work/world-forum-radio/). She is the principal at the Mother Earth's Children Charter School in Alberta, Canada. Skalski mentioned that while growing up, she never believed that she would become a teacher, but her grandmother had always envisioned her as one. She eventually realized that her grandmother's vision for her life was correct. When she took over the position as principal for MECCS, she realized that she had entered an environment that faced a lot of opposition. The staff turnover rate was extremely high, resulting in a lack of leadership for the school. However, as Skalski continued to work with the students at the school, she quickly identified that the children lacked backgrounds in family values and strong work ethics that she experienced while growing up. It quickly became her mission to instill these values in these children so they could learn that they can pursue their hopes and dreams. Skalski's story reminded me a lot of my experience working for Head Start. We come across many children that come from impoverished backgrounds. These families struggle to put food on the table and many have experienced homelessness at one point. The hardships carried by the parents are often passed on to the children, making it difficult for the children to discover their aspirations and dreams. It is our responsibility as educators to provide the children with the resources that they need to not only succeed in the classroom, but in their home environment as well. We work closely with the families to assist them with providing a nurturing home environment, which is a key component to healthy childhood development.

I also took the opportunity to explore UNESCO's Early Childhood Care and Education webpage (http://www.unesco.org/new/en/education/themes/strengthening-education-systems/early-childhood/). Under the Access and Equity tab, I found an article about the home-based programs in New Zealand (http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0013/001373/137381e.pdf). This caught my attention because part of our Early Head Start program is home-based and it is the sector of EHS that I am least familiar with. I had assumed that "home-based" for New Zealand meant the same thing to them as it does here, but I was wrong.  Home-based services in New Zealand is the equivalent to family child care services to us in the United States. One similarity between the two programs is that there is a coordinator overseeing the homes that are participating in the program. One major difference that I noted was that their home-based programs are heavily regulated by the government, where family child care centers in the United States are rarely regulated with many of them not being licensed. New Zealand's home-based programs follow a curriculum for instruction for the children. Family child care centers in the United States can sometimes reflect group babysitting services, where little education is offered to the children. I would strongly like to see the United States to move toward regulated family child care centers, similar to New Zealand's home-based centers. Many families are leaning toward family child care because it tends to be a cheaper alternative to placing their children in a regular child care center. If the government begins to regulate family child care centers, then the children attending these centers may not miss out on valuable learning opportunities that often come from attending quality child care centers.

Sharing Web Resources - Additional Information

Throughout the past few weeks, I have had a chance to explore the ChildCare Aware of America website at http://www.naccrra.org/. One of the links that I chose to explore this week was the Publications tab. From there, I was given the chance to review a list of publications that ChildCare Aware has produced that are available for purchase as resources for childcare agencies. One of the publications titled Parents and the High Cost of Child Care: 2012 Report (http://www.naccrra.org/publications/naccrra-publications/2012/8/parents-and-the-high-cost-of-child-care-2012-report) I used as a resource for our main assignment this week. I was very surprised to learn through this document the price of child care services throughout the United States. For example, the price for infant care in a child care center could range anywhere from $1500 to $16000! One of the biggest struggles for families looking for quality child care services for their families is cost. As the quality of care increases, the price of services almost always increases as well. Families end up sacrificing quality in order to find affordable child care for their children, even if the conditions that the children are cared for in are not ideal.

I also took the time to look more into the information contained under the Programs and Services tab, particularly at the Child Care Partners section. There I found that in December, ChildCare Aware of America had partnered with Parents magazine to help persuade Congress to focus on child care during their negotiations. I followed the link provided to reviewed the article listed in the December issue of the magazine (http://www.parents.com/baby/childcare/child-care-crisis/). The article features a family who was lucky to have found a child care center that produced quality education, but the family was devastated to learn that the center was forced to close due to recent budget cuts in child care funding. This article hit home for me because I know of a few child care programs that have been forced to close their doors due to the budget cuts resulting from the sequestration issued in March, one of those centers was a child care research program located at a local community college. Hundreds of families will be looking for child care starting this summer due to the closure of these programs. Few centers will be able to increase the spots that they have available, so families will have to look elsewhere for lower par child care services.

I did sign up for the e-newsletters from the website, but have not received any updates recently. As a result, I returned to the website's homepage and reviewed some of the recent news releases. President Obama has released his budget proposal for the fiscal year 2014, which contains a significant push for increased funding for early childhood education (http://www.naccrra.org/news-room/press-releases/2013/4/child-care-aware®-of-america-executive-director-at-white-house-budge). My supervisor and I sat down this week when he released the budget and reviewed his proposal. We were very excited to learn that he is suggesting a focus on increased funding for Early Head Start programs and Home Visiting programs, recognizing the need for a strong foundation in education and related services for children beginning at birth. I am anxious to see what Congress decides to do with the proposed budget, especially after these exact same programs took a large budget cut with the sequestration.

Tiffany

Getting to Know Your International Contacts - Part 2

I still have not heard back from any of my international contacts, so I continued working on the podcast alternative for the assignment. This week, I reviewed the World Forum Radio podcast featuring George Forman (http://worldforumfoundation.org/wf/wp/current-work/world-forum-radio/). Forman is the Co-founder of Videatives, Inc., which is a company that helps educators understand children's play by video recording children during play and then providing a narrative description about what the child is doing and what the child's thinking process could actually be. Forman has extensively studied Piaget's theories on play, writing several books about the topic. During an child observation, Forman discovered that children may actually be learning about their environment from an active, verb-focused viewpoint. Instead of looking at how things are in the world, children look at their environment and see what everything is doing. The little boy in Forman's observation was playing with a log. He stopped walking and set the log in a vertical position. We would normally say that the log looked like a tower, which is a noun-based conclusion. Forman concluded that the boy was excited to see the log stand on end because it was standing, not falling, which is a verb-based conclusion. I really like Forman's view of thinking in terms of focusing on the world through a verb-based lens. Children are often engaged in play, so they are always manipulating objects and determining what their actions do to the objects.

I also took the opportunity to review Harvard University's Global Children's Initiative website (http://developingchild.harvard.edu/index.php/activities/global_initiative/). One thing that I was able to relate to was when reading the Initiative's fact sheet, I noticed that they are focusing on improving mental health resources for children around the world. In my classroom and in our program, we have noticed a significant increase in the number of children and their families who have needed mental health serviced due to a variety of factors in their lives. For example, we have an eighteen month old child whose mother is in prison for drug consumption and possession and the child has displayed an increasing amount of biting behavior in the classroom. Through observations, we cannot find any specific triggers that provoke the biting, so we have called for mental health services to help us assist the child with working through this behavior. A variety of factors can influence mental health behaviors that need to be addressed and it seems that the Global Children's Initiative agrees. Another insight that I gained from the website was the impact that malaria and other health issues are having on the educational experience for children in Zambia. The overall life expectancy for the population of Zambia remains below fifty years, due to the impact of poverty and illness. Educators understand the importance of early childhood education and care practices and how it can improve a child's life expectancy and performance, which is why they are focusing on improving the malaria treatment and prevention practices in Zambia. By helping children receive a healthy start in life, advocates hope to improve the children's education performance and increase life expectancy. I also followed the link to the ACEV: Mother Child Education Foundation (http://www.acev.org/en/anasayfa). The ACEV is based in Turkey, but has partnered with organizations in thirteen other countries. They focus on strengthening the relationships between the mother and child and the father and child in needy homes, understanding that healthy relationships are a key component to a child's childhood experience. ACEV provides a variety of professional development trainings for educators to assist families with improving early childhood experiences in the needy families of Turkey and Turkish immigrants around the world. I found it reassurig that other educators around the world share the same aspirations for early childhood education as we do in the United States.

Sharing Web Resources-Update

As I continue to explore the website for Child Care Aware of America (http://www.naccrra.org), I am learning more about the various resources that they have to offer for child care providers. For providers who wish to continue working on professional development, Child Care Aware of America offers a professional development training center (http://naccrra.smarthorizons.org/index.html). In the training center, there are numerous courses available, depending on the goals that the provider is looking to accomplish. For example, a provider can work on their Child Development Associate (CDA) initial certification and their renewal. Providers can also take specialized courses that are geared toward certain curricular areas that their students may be struggling in. Some of these specialized courses include child-directed activities, early literacy, and music activities. There are also professional development trainings that are geared specifically toward center-based or family-based child care providers, which can be beneficial since general trainings may not necessarily include topics or issues that are more relevant to center-based or family-based environments.

One article from the website that gained my attention was Child Care Aware of America Supports the Child Care Protection Act of 2013, which can be found at http://www.naccrra.org/news-room/press-releases/2013/3/child-care-aware®-of-america-supports-the-child-care-protection-act-. This particular bill that was recently introduced would require comprehensive background checks for all child care providers. As of right now, this process is only mandated in 13 states in the U.S. Since in Ohio, we are required to submit to regular fingerprinting for background checks if you work with children (I had to do this when I was a lifeguard for my local YMCA), I was shocked to hear that this is not a mandatory process for all individuals who could be working with children. This truly scares me to think that I could move to another state and place my children in a child care program where the staff could potentially be sex offenders or have been convicted of child abuse!

It took me a little while to search the website for an example of the support of early childhood education provided by someone other than educators and the federal government, but I did come across an article from New Mexico that described the movement to amend the state constitution to allow for funding toward pre-Kindergarten programs (http://coreissues.usa.childcareaware.org/latest-news/amendment-would-boost-early-childhood-education/). Even local business owners, such as Victor Limary-owner of Talin Market, support the move to provide state-funded preschool. The article states that by investing in the education of young children, the state is investing in the future of the local businesses by increasing the talent pool. This act is still in the making though because there are still several opposing groups, such as a local chamber of commerce that does not currently see that a current investment in the state's young children will bring a greater economic return in the future. I am curious to see if this amendment ends up passing!

Getting to Know Your International Contacts

The past few weeks have been very educational for me, even if I have not received any feedback from any of my international education professionals. I often find myself browsing the Internet looking for various education programs from around the world and explore their websites for any similarities or differences to education programs in the United States. One of the things that I have learned during this process is that all educators around the world are passionate for helping children not only succeed in the classroom, but in life overall. As educators, we understand that it is our responsibility to build a strong, stable foundation for children to learn critical developmental skills that they will use for a lifetime.

Since I did not receive any feedback from any of my professionals from around the world, I have switched to an alternative assignment, which involves reviewing and reflecting on the podcasts issued by the World Forum Foundation. This week, I chose to listen to the podcasts featuring Susan Lyon and Barbara Jones. Susan Lyon is the founder of the Innovative Teacher Project (http://www.innovativeteacherproject.org/index.php), which bases its educational principles off of the Reggio Emilia approach to learning. I loved hearing Susan Lyon describe her experience working with a little boy on how to spell the word "city". During that special moment, she learned the importance of viewing the world through a child's eyes, which I agree is a key principle that educators need to focus on when working directly with children. Children may not necessarily view the world in the way that we want them to see things, so it is our job as educators to take a step back and learn each child's perspective on things. Barbara Jones is the founder of the Pine Grove Montessori School in Falmouth, Maine. She began her career in Early Childhood Education looking to take part in a non-traditional early childhood program. That is when she came across for a listing for a teacher position available for a Montessori school in California. She later moved to Maine and came across a small schoolhouse. She took the opportunity to purchase the school, renovate it, and turn it into her own Montessori program, which has been running successfully for over 25 years. The Pine Grove Montessori School (http://www.pinegrovecenter.com/index.html) follows the ideas of Maria Montessori, who acknowledged the fact that children are naturally-driven learners. The school uses observations for each child to learn about the children's interests and then provide materials and carefully guided learning activities for the students to explore at their own pace.

I also took the opportunity to explore the website for the Childhood Poverty Research and Policy Centre (http://www.childhoodpoverty.org/) and look at the childhood poverty information provided for Kyrgyzstan. I knew that compared to the United States, the economic status for Kyrgyzstan was relatively low, but I was shocked when I learned about the number of children living in poverty conditions in the country. Forty-nine percent of urban children under the age of 20 and 55 percent of rural children under the age of 20 were living in poverty conditions. Of those children, 18 percent were not able to afford basic food expenses, leading to a high rate of malnutrition in the country. Due to the poor economic conditions, children are having to drop out of school and work to help support their families, which leads to a decline in the number of "properly" educated people in the country. Another factor of poverty hitting the country is the lack of access to health services. Some illnesses associated with poverty, such as tuberculosis, are beginning to redevelop in the country. As these illnesses affect the children, less children are able to work due to illness, again having an impact on the economic welfare of the people. I found this website very informative because it allowed me to look into how poverty is affecting other parts of the world. I can also compare my local poverty outcomes to those around the world and look at the similarities and differences in how poverty affects the people involved. In Kyrgyzstan, children are having to drop out of school to help earn income for their families. In the United States, child labor laws prevent children from being able to work to support their family, so families are forced to look for additional ways add income to their family.

Sharing Web Resources

The agency that I decided to focus my study on was the National Association of Child Care Resource and Referral Agencies, which can be found at http://www.naccrra.org. The agency offers readers the opportunity to subscribe to one of their various newsletters, with topics ranging from advocacy, public policy, and family resources. I subscribed to all of the them, so that I could follow the various topics that the agency addressed.

One of the topics that caught my eye this week was the push to contact local political leaders to take a stand against the recent sequestration that has taken effect in our country. This topic really hit home for me because my Head Start and Early Head Start program is facing a 5.3% budget cut on the remainder of our fiscal year. This cut adds up to around $122,000 that we have to cut from services. We are doing the best that we can to keep from cutting services offered to children, but we may have to shorten the current Head Start school year by one week in order to cover part of the loss. This means that our children can miss out on a week's worth of valuable learning that could help them prepare for entering school in the fall.

I also took the opportunity to sit down and review the agency's Strategic Plan for 2010-2015 to see what their goals were for improving quality child care, which can be found at http://www.naccrra.org/sites/default/files/default_site_pages/2012/strategic_plan_2010-2015.pdf. I found it interesting that about 90% of the child care programs in our country are NOT considered high quality. This is due to high staff turnover, lack of staff training and education, poor state requirements, and the lack of funding. As a parent who is currently looking for child care for my almost 4 year old daughter and will be newborn, I am scared to think of the cost that child care is going to be for my family. As an educator, I know the importance of high quality care, but as a parent, I simply cannot afford it. I am hoping that as I continue to learn about NACCRRA, I will find an answer to finding affordable high quality child care before I actually come to need it.