Your Personal Research Journey

My chosen topic for this simulation is play. Play is essential for children’s social, emotional, cognitive, linguistic, and physical development. Play is the way children develop and learn. It is also the way they express their understanding of the world. Play enables children to develop social skills, develop physical skills, learn concepts, and enhance self-esteem. According to an article, “Play is crucial for your child's social, emotional, physical, and cognitive growth. It's your child's way of learning about his body and the world, and he'll use all five senses to do it, especially in the first year” (Baby Center, 2014).

I chose play because there are many educators and others who believe that play is a waste of time for children and most of their time should be focused on academics. I believe that children need to play because this is how they learn.

My personal experience is some of my most memorable moments as a child involves play. As I watch my own children at play, I see that they are expressing who they are, what they know and feel, and what they are able to do.

The research chart has helped me to have a deeper understanding of early childhood research. This course, so far, has helped me to become more aware of the resources that are available to me.

I would greatly appreciate any advice or insight that may help me through this process, as well as any resources you would like to share with me. I would be more than happy to share resources with you if you want or need me to.

Baby Center. (2014). Play: Why it’s so important? Retrieved May 17, 2014, from http://www.babycenter.com/0_play-why-its-so-important_6772.bc

Three Consequences of Learning About the International Early Childhood Field

The first consequence of learning about the international early childhood field is now I am more aware of what is going on in other countries as it pertains to education, poverty, equity, diversity, and many other issues. I was aware that poverty existed but not to this extent around the world. 

The second consequence of learning about the international early childhood field is that I have gained a tremendous amount of useful information and have become more knowledgeable about other countries. I was not concerned about what was going on in other countries before taking this course. I will continue to visit the websites so I can stay informed about what is going on in other countries around the world, not just in the United States. 

The third consequence of learning about the international early childhood field is that even though I was not able to connect with someone from another country, I will continue to try so I can gain more information about what is going on in their international early childhood community. I know that I can learn plenty from communicating with someone from another country.

The one goal for the field related to international awareness of issues and trends and the spirit of collegial relations is that we all come together one day to help eradicate poverty around the world. Poverty can be detrimental to children’s achievement and life prospects. We should advocate for one another around the world. We must work together to end poverty for our children and their families. 

I hope to continue to collaborate with my colleagues throughout our courses together. I enjoyed reading and posting on your blogs and I hope you all feel the same. I look forward to interacting with you all soon. I would like to wish you all the best in future courses!!!

Getting to Know Your International Contacts- Part 3

              

 Big Push workshop to accelerate early childhood care and education in Africa

Among the 19 African countries that have joined the Big Push Initiative to accelerate Education for All, four countries have chosen to focus on boosting early childhood care and education (ECCE). They are Angola, São Tomé & Principe, Swaziland and Zambia.

Other countries (Burkina Faso, Niger, Senegal, Uganda and Zambia) have also voiced their interest in this important area that is extremely important to prepare young children for school and learning.

Seven training modules based on research results have been produced by the UNESCO Institute for Capacity-Building (IICBA) and partners. The modules form the IECCE model, which provides tools, skills and resources to people working with vulnerable children and their families. One of the fundamentals of IECCE model is that local and indigenous children are to be educated within their cultural context. 

The IECCE modules are living documents with a goal to build capacities among, inter alia, parents, older relations in the households and extended family members, elders in the neighborhood, older siblings, including helpers and interested stakeholders who can read and write in their local language.The learning can therefore be home-, community- or institutional based. 

Early Childhood Care and Education is having a hard time in Africa. Only a little more than one out of four African child aged between 0-8 get a chance to attend some kind of preschool activities. But the situation differs enormously between countries and region. According to 2010 data the situation is as follows:

• In Southern Africa (SADC), early childhood enrollment stood at 45% on average
• In East Africa (EAC), only Kenya and Tanzania achieved above 30% level while the average went up to 27%.
• In Central Africa (ECCAS), despite the fact that pre-primary enrollment has more than doubled, the average has only reached 26%.
• In West Africa (ECOWAS) (with the exception of Cabo Verde and Ghana), progress has been more timid and rates (19 percent on average) and well below the average of 28% in sub-Saharan Africa.

This training workshop is the result of combined efforts by IICBA, UNESCO Dakar, UNESCO Windhoek, The Ministry of Education of Burkina Faso, The national Commission for UNESCO of Burkina Faso, CIEFFA, OSISA, UNICEF Uganda and Plan International.

The insights I have gained after reading this article is that children need us to advocate for them to improve their education. One of my professional goals is to become a highly-qualified teacher so I can be better prepared to educate and teach my children to be successful in school. The workshops that are being provided in my agency and in these countries can be very beneficial to many including the children.

http://www.unesco.org/new/en/dakar/about-this-office/single-view/news/big_push_workshop_to_accelerate_early_childhood_care_and_education_in_africa/#.U1M3kaIbX0F

 

Sharing Web Resources

The NBCDI website has many links; Policy, Early Care and Education, Health, Family Engagement, Literacy, and Child Welfare. An outside link that I have not explored under the National Black Child Development Institute is the Early Care and Education link. On this site it states a quote for the President:

“Life doesn't count for much unless you're willing to do your small part to leave our children - all of our children - a better world.”

- President Barack Obama, 2008 

 

I have not received an e-newsletter, but a tremendous amount of information is available on this site and has added to my understanding of equity and excellence in early care and education. According to this site, "
Since its inception, NBCDI has been dedicated to supporting the development of a high-quality, accessible, affordable and aligned system of early care and education for children birth through age eight.  Each of these years is critical to the socio-emotional and educational success of students, particularly students of color, because they provide the foundation for all subsequent learning and development.
In our program and policy work, NBCDI supports federal, state and local efforts to provide increasing numbers of low-income children with access to quality early education and care; efforts to create a strong and supported early childhood workforce; and efforts to promote developmentally and culturally-appropriate standards, curriculum, instruction and assessment that are aligned within and across the early childhood to early grades continuum.
We believe it is critical for the sometimes disparate communities of early care and education, K-12 education and higher education to come together, particularly around the priority area of effective teaching.  In both the early education and K-12 systems, we know that effective teaching and high-quality instruction is a central component of children’s achievement, and, further, that consistent access to effective teachers and leaders can narrow the achievement gap and provide particularly strong benefits for children from low-income communities.Yet we also know that on nearly every available measure, we can be confident that Black students are being taught by less qualified and less effective teachers over time.  

• To increase and equitably distribute quality across the birth through eight continuum, while also connecting early childhood and elementary schools, NBCDI focuses on: 
• Supporting specific efforts to recruit, professionally prepare, compensate and retain a well-qualified workforce across multiple birth through eight settings, including family and center-based child care as well as public and charter schools
• Commitments to ensuring cultural and racial diversity in the workforce, which has decreased, even while the population of children has grown increasingly more diverse
• Supporting the development and revision of QRIS (Quality Rating and Improvement Systems) that are as focused on the “Quality” and the “Improvement” as they are on the “Rating”
• Explicitly advocating for the inclusion of school- and community-based early childhood teachers and administrators in joint professional development opportunities with K-12 teachers and administrators
• Encouraging the development of culturally, linguistically and developmentally valid and reliable measurement tools for young children and the classrooms in which they learn
• Encouraging states, districts and schools to embed professional development opportunities that support a deeper understanding of families’ race and culture, and explicitly teach teachers from all backgrounds how to develop and strengthen relationships with parents and the community". 

 

http://www.nbcdi.org/what-we-do/early-care-and-education

 

Getting to Know Your International Contacts-Part 2

I explored the Harvard University “Global Children’s Initiative’ website. The information I have gained after reading the “Applying the Science of Early Childhood in Brazil” article is “As part of its Global Children’s Initiative, the Center launched Núcleo Ciência Pela Infância, its first major programmatic effort outside the United States. In collaboration with local experts, this project aims to use the science of child health and development to guide stronger policies and larger investments to benefit young children and their families in Brazil. This project represents a unique opportunity for the Center to work with Brazilian scholars, policymakers, and civil society leaders to adapt the Center’s programmatic model for the local context in order to catalyze more effective policies and programs that will, ultimately, foster a more prosperous, sustainable, and equitable society”.

The article, “Studying the Effects of Global Adversity, Two Generations at a Time” talks about HIV/AIDS and how it is affecting children and their parents in Rwanda. The article states “When humanitarian crises hit around the world, nongovernmental organizations rush into the fray, intensively focused on urgent survival needs, not necessarily on longer-term impacts that may take an even greater toll on the country and its citizens. Betancourt, who is currently studying both former child soldiers in Sierra Leone and children whose parents have HIV/AIDS in Rwanda, says that one reason NGOs may not have incorporated the latest thinking into what they are doing is that there just haven’t been enough studies done on global child mental health”.

I also read the “Zambian Early Childhood Development Project” article. It states that “While a large number of studies have investigated the impact of early childhood experiences on children’s developmental, health, and educational outcomes in developed countries, relatively little evidence is available on early childhood development in sub-Saharan Africa. To address this knowledge gap, the Zambian Ministry of Education, the Examination Council of Zambia, UNICEF, the University of Zambia, and the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University launched the Zambian Early Childhood Development Project (ZECDP) in 2009, a collaborative effort to measure the effects of an ongoing anti-malaria initiative on children’s development in Zambia”. After reading the article, I learned that malaria is still one of the leading causes of death in Zambia.

Lastly, the “Un Buen Comienzo (UBC)” “A Good Start” is a collaborative project in Santiago, Chile, to improve early childhood education through teacher professional development. The idea is to improve the quality of educational offerings for four-to-six-year-olds, particularly in the area of language development. This project is also designed to intervene in critical health areas that improve school attendance as well as socioemotional development, and it seeks to involve the children's families in their education”. After reading this article, I can see that their country is doing the same as ours; trying to do all they can to improve early childhood education.

http://developingchild.harvard.edu/index.php/activities/global_initiative/applying_the_science_of_early_childhood_in_brazi/

http://developingchild.harvard.edu/index.php/faculty_and_staff/faculty/faculty_spotlights/theresa_betancourt/

http://developingchild.harvard.edu/activities/global_initiative/zambian_project/

http://developingchild.harvard.edu/index.php/activities/global_initiative/ubc/  

Sharing Web Resources

The website that I chose was The Global Fund for Children. The information that seemed relevant to me was what I read about poverty and its effects on children and their families. Poverty is a serious problem in the area that I live in and many of the children in my classroom are living in poverty. Poverty can have a negative effect on children’s brain development and their lives.

The article that I read states “The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) describes poverty in Lebanon as a serious situation requiring more attention, in spite of some commendable improvement in the last decade. UNDP estimates that 8 percent of the Lebanese population lives in extreme poverty, meaning that almost 300,000 individuals in Lebanon are unable to meet their basic survival needs. Furthermore, approximately 28.5 percent of the population is below the upper poverty line, which is about $4 per capita per day. There are also huge disparities in poverty demographics, with a heavy concentration of poverty in certain regions and increased poverty in urban areas, especially around large cities like Beirut. Many families make a meager living through begging or temporary manual labor, but the sporadic nature of this income limits their ability to plan ahead or save, increasing their vulnerability when faced with difficult life situations. Child labor is also common, as children are required to supplement the income of their families. Children work as beggars, as sellers of various items on the streets, and as manual laborers in various sectors” (The Global Fund for Children, 2014). This information opened my eyes to the many children that I see on the streets trying to make money to help their families. Sometimes when we see children on the streets doing illegal things, they are doing it to make a living for themselves and their families.

This website does not contain any information that could add to my understanding of how economists, neuroscientists, and politicians support the early childhood field. I searched and searched but could not find anything. I did find out that this organization has many grantees to help support them. These grantees serve many of the world’s most vulnerable children.

The insight that I have gained is that many urban and rural areas are affected with poverty. Living in these areas can lead to decreased support for education. In this case, children who are living in these areas and in poverty will more than likely attend schools that have poor facilities and fewer resources.

The Global Fund for Children. (2014). Voices from Hay al-Gharbeh. Retrieved March 29, 2014, from https://www.globalfundforchildren.org/voices-from-hay-al-gharbeh/