week 8 - Reflection Blog

Week 8- blog assignment – Stella Chou

As a Chinese, to me, anything outside China is international. There are a lot of resources, information, programs and updates available in the US. Information sharing is common and helpful. Thank you to the internet magical power, it has enabled us to get any information at a touch at any time and any place. The interaction, communication and discussion with the colleagues and international contact have also enlightened with ideas from others that I might not have thought of.

The three key learnings for me during the last 8 weeks or during this course are:

1) Poverty – I learnt more about the poverty situation in China. It astonishes me that the programs and funding done and given by government have not been able to catch up with the inflation. If USD 1 per day is the poverty line, there are 150 millions of people in China is living below the line. More than 12% of this is children below aged 6. And the majority of them are living in rural areas where they are remote from cities or convenient transportation means. I am even surprised to see that USA is also having a significant amount of the poverty population while USA is such a well-developed country in the world.

2) Insights from economists, politicians and scientists in early childhood education and care – it is grateful that more people are caring about early childhood education and care. From an economics perspective, early childhood education is seen as a good investment for the country. Its payback can even be measured quantitatively through the research. It is nice to draw the attention of a politician and, of course, the scientists to study and be involved more on early childhood education and care.

3) Impact of diversity – in China, 99% of children is Chinese. So diversity might not be such a significant factor affecting early childhood education. It is interesting to find out that more countries are facing diversity issue in their population mix. As a result, resources have to be put on diversity to ensure the minority group or the immigrant children will be taken good care of. At the moment, such problem might not be an issue for China yet.

The goal for international awareness of issues and trends I would like to set is to understand more poverty issues in other countries, such as Africa, South American or other Asian market. This might be an area that I can do my further research.

week 7 - quality of early childhood professionals - inernational contact sharing

Week 7 blog assignment – quality of early childhood professionals

 

My professional goal is to take what I have learned from this course to help opening a preschool and kindergarten for poor and migrant children in the villages in China. Migrant children refer to those children being left at hometown by the parents as the parents have to work in the city. The children are being taken care either by grandparents or relatives. They are neglected and are left at hometown. Most of the time, they do not have the opportunity to get early childhood education. I have shared this with my international contact in Canada, Winnie Leung.

 

What issues regarding quality and early childhood professionals are being discussed where you live and work?

According to Winnie, the standards and requirements for early childhood professionals in Canada are various. There is no standard requirement for preschool educational professionals. Like her, she does not have any early childhood professional training and she is recruited to work in a preschool center. Some teachers in her school do have a diploma degree or certificate but not degree.

 

What opportunities and/or requirements for professional development exist?

There is no training nor professional development program provided to the teachers or caretakers by their center. During the summer, they have 2 days known as Teacher’s professional development day. Teachers are supposed to take some training courses related to early childhood education. But usually the school will let the teachers find their own training courses in the market and bring back the receipt for reimbursement for the expenses incurred. Some teachers simply take the days off rather than taking any professional development courses. So the rules are rather loose in Canada.

 

What are some of your professional goals?

Winnie likes young children very much. She likes taking care of young children. She would like to take on some early childhood professional diploma course to improve and enhance her knowledge about early childhood education so that she can be a formal teacher in the school.

 

What are some of your professional hopes, dreams, and challenges?

Her dream is to own and run a child care center herself one day.  But it is challenging in Canada as the laws and rules of running a child care center are strict. It is not easy to get a license. Further the financial support from the government is decreasing. It is not easy to make money by owning a child care center.

Week 6 – blog assignment

The outside links:

I learnt the term Cyberbullying from the website that a new submission to the Australian Federal government to enhance children’s online safety. This is a term referring to one child bullying the other via interactive technology. Then I also found another website named www.stopcyberbullying.org which is an organization promoting “Stop Cyberbullying” to the children. There are a lot of information about what cyberbullying is exactly meant and advices to prevent it. There was a StopCyberBullying Youth Summit that was held on Mar 22, 2014 in New Brunswick. More government are working on bills to promote the internet safety for children.

Thorough search one are of the site. What do you find?

There are tips advising how to prevent or stop cyberbullying. The key is to educate the children about the consequences such as losing their ISP or IM accounts. It is also important to teach them to respect others and to take a stand against bullying of all kinds. As there are different types of cyberbullying, there is no "one size fits all" solution. Cyberbullying is different from traditional schoolyard bullying. The motives and the nature of cyber-communications, as well as the demographic and profile of a cyberbully,  differ from their offline counterpart.

New information available:

I found some early childhood best practices in New York Early Childhood Professional Development Institute website. It has information about general best practices in early childhood education and Best Practices in Infants and Toddlers. Also, it has other useful links in relation to best practices from other websites. These are useful tips for educators.

The website adds to my understanding of equity and excellence in early care and education:

I learnt that Australian Government has a funding named Australian Government’s Child Care Flexibility Fund. This is to support the provision of flexibility in early childhood care and education to anything to meet the needs of the families. This includes provision of non-standards hours, flexible sessions and enrolment, working in combination with other services and flexible location or service delivery. This flexibility would be able to accommodate the diverse needs of children and families from different background and culture. (http://www.earlychildhoodaustralia.org.au)

Other insights about issues and trends

There is an Edutech Congress & Expo this week in Brisbane. The Leading education thinker Sir Ken Robinson has drawn the attention of the participants in three concepts he brought along:

• these are revolutionary times — we live in times with no precedent

• to meet the revolution we have to think differently on talent and ability

We have to behave differently and run institutions differently.

“Technology liberates and changes the world. It helps us conceive of things we would never have thought of. Yet when most tools have unintended consequences Robinson's words reminded educators to do what they do best — think, choose, guide.” (early childhood Australia website)

 

References

Early Childhood Australia website, extracted from http://www.earlychildhoodaustralia.org.au/supporting_best_practice/supporting_best_practice.html

New York early childhood Professional Development Institute, extracted from http://www.earlychildhoodnyc.org/resources/aboutECE_bestPractices.cfm

Stop cyberbullying organization, extracted from http://www.stopcyberbullying.org

week 5 - global initiatives project

I explored the Harvard website about global initiatives project. This is a very informative and helpful website for early childhood educators. The three projects that I would like to discuss included: Zambian Early Childhood Development Project, Núcleo Ciência Pela Infância Project and Children & Crisis Project.

Zambian Early Childhood Development Project is a collaborative project to measure the effects of an ongoing anti-malaria initiative on children’s development in Zambia. It is one of the poorest countries in the world with 13 million people with an average income of USD1500 in 2008. Mortality rate of children under age 5 is 12%. (World Bank 2010) The Zambian Early Childhood Development Project (ZECDP) was a coordinated project by Zambian Ministry of Education, the Examination Council of Zambia, UNICEF, the University of Zambia and Harvard University Center in 2009.  (Gunther Fink & Beatrice Matafwali & Corrina Moucheraud & Stephanie Simons Zuilkowski, 2009) The project was “to determine the effect of early childhood environment, health and education on children’s development before and throughout their schooling careers.

The Children and Crisis Project is a joint project by the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative and Francois-Xavier Bagnoud Center at Harvard School of Public Health. Its objective is “to enhance interdisciplinary collaboration incorporating a science-based, developmental perspective into the assessment and management of child well-being in a range of natural and man-made crises, focusing on both immediate circumstances and long term adaptation.”

The Nucleo Ciencia Pela Infancia Project is collaborated by the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American studies at Harvard University, Fundacao Maria Cecillia Souto Vidigal, the Faculty of Medicine at the Medicine at the University of São Paulo, and Insper. The objectives are to use scientific approach in child health and development to help develop stronger policies and provide larger investment to benefit young children and their families in Brazil.

 

References

Fink G., Matafwali B., Moucheraud C., Simons S., 2009, The Zambian Early Childhood Development Project, 2010 Assessment Final Report, Harvard University’s Global Children’s Initiative website, extracted from http://developingchild_harvard_edu/initiatives/global_initiative

 

Global children’s Initiative of Harvard University, 2014, extracted from http://developingchild.harvard.edu/activities/global_initiative/

 

week 4 - website sharing

Week 4 – Blog

The website I read from is www.earlychildhoodaustralia.org.au/

It is a site targeting at early childhood professionals, policymakers and educators. It is a very content rich website that provides a lot of useful information, updates, news and researches for the targets. It has all the updated information about the policy in Australia, trends and changes about early childhood education.

In one of the articles written by the Editor, Alison Elliot dated 2010, he wrote, “Ambitious and complex policy reform processes to lift quality across early childhood services are well underway. Today, the early childhood sector, government and community are largely united in valuing early education.” (Allison Elliot, 2010) Furthermore, he mentioned that preschools and children centers are developed and managed separately for the last 100 years. It is the first time that a serious national policy shift to put education and care together around the value of education and the need for quality early education programs for all children. Focus is on quality, educational significance and outcomes. To do so, Commonwealth and state governments and expert policy groups have worked with key stakeholders to develop and progress the change agenda. This will be a slow process involving legislative, jurisdictional and funding changes. Various considerations and elements are needed to be considered. It includes early childhood educators professional and career development and incentives, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders ethnics groups, poverty in remote areas, play a foundational role in learning, digital technologies and working with families. Taking the recent research from Harvard University economists, the plan will also stress on the long term value of early childhood education, the value of quality teaching in generating learning outcomes and later development potential for the children. Such investment will be across the board ranges covering all. It is what we are studying about the influences of economists, neuroscientists, and politicians on early childhood field.

There is a media release by the website in May, 2014 talking about parents are paying more for early childhood education and care services, despite a significant increase in government spending. It also discussed the detailed analysis done by Early Childhood Australia indicated that “by the end of the freeze (2017-18), families will be paying thousands more for services, despite the Federal Government committing more than AUS$7 billion per year on subsidies. This information is contradictory to the reform the Editor Allison Elliot refers about. I think more in depth learning of the reform and analysis are needed in order to understand better the two views.

The websites provide information on early childhood news, research papers, best practices sharing and other resources regarding how economists, scientists and politicians support the early childhood field. It is interesting researchers in Australia have proved that children attending just one year of preschool education attains 20 points higher in reading, spelling, writing and numeracy under the national plan of all children attending 15 hours of preschool in the year before school of 40 weeks of the year. However, 25%-92% of children in various States attending the 15 hours a year. There are still a lot needed to be done.

 

References:

Early Childhood Australia website, extracted from www.earlychildhoodaustralia.org.au

 

week 3- conversation partner learnings

Week 3 blog assignment

The conversation partner I have is Professor Hui Li of Faculty of Education, the University of Hong Kong and Winnie Leung, an early childhood teacher in an early childhood center, Canada.

Dr Hui Li is focusing on Chinese literature and language learning and early childhood education. He told me he did researches together with some scholars from the universities in China. Though he also did researches about early childhood curriculum in Hong Kong and studied the education system in Hong Kong. He provided government advices on the project relating “using Chinese language as the principle teaching media.” In this project, there were a lot of noises whether this should be executed though some parents disagreed. Since Chinese is the mother tongue of the population in Hongkong, using Chinese language will help children understand better. Some parents view that Hong Kong being an international city, English is very important for the future career and development of the children…. Anyway the argument went on and on.

Winnie is a teacher in the early childhood center. She loved children very much. Anyone taking teacher as a profession, someone must have passions and love to children. Or else she will not do a good job. She said a few of teachers in her school just took it as a job. She could feel that they did not like the children saying they were annoying. This was not good for both sides. She also had children from another minority group. She can tell they are living in a barely sufficient condition. She will try her best to provide more support to them in terms language and attention.

I find more information about the poverty in China. More than 18% of people living in China are below the UN poverty line 1.75 USD per day. The free education provided by the government is only 9 years from primary 1-9. Not much is being done by the government on early childhood education. The theory of the government is the children don’t have to start school till age 6 to Primary 1. Under the scheme, government is providing lunch and books free for the 9 years. There was a situation. A 6 year old boy went to the school and he had to walk an hour every day before arriving at the school. He always took the school lunch and ate a little and kept it in the lunch box. The teacher found out he brought the food back to his little sister who was aged 4 studying in the same school for kindergarten. The kindergarten did not provide food to children because it was not within the 9 years scheme. So his little sister could only bring the food from home that was just a piece of sweet potato. The little boy shared his food with his sister by bringing it to her kindergarten. How sad the situation was. This is not the only example.

Early Childhood website

The site that I have picked is “Australian Early Childhood Advocacy Organization”. This organization has been established for 75 years since1938. It is a mature and very rich information website. The link is as below:

http://www.earlychildhoodaustralia.org.au/about_us/about_early_childhood_australia.html

It is a non-government and non-profit organization for the voice for young children acting in the interests of young children, their families and those in early childhood field.  Its vision is 'Our role in achieving this vision is to be an effective advocate for young children and a champion for quality outcomes in early childhood education and care' (Early Childhood Australia)

One has to be the member to get the newsletter and membership is not free. But there is a lot of information that is available for free. It has introduced their vision, the organization structure, code of Ethics, position statement and branches in each State of Australia. All the updates or information from government about early childhood news are listed. They also organize conferences and events for parents and early childhood professionals that everyone can participate. Speeches from their members at conferences and seminars are published at their site so that everyone can share what the experts said.  They also publish “Australian Journal of Early Childhood” and “Every child Magazine”

There is a session named “Supporting Best practice” in the website. It provides advices and information on emotional foundations for learning, everyday learning and play, Feelings and behaviors, learning about babies and toddlers, learning about children 3 to 9 years, learning and teaching and children’s rights. It has comprehensive information for families, early childhood professionals and schools administrators. There is section on “Diversity and inclusion”.  It includes information such as the benefits of inclusion, checklist for inclusive environments and children with disability. It is quick and easy tips for educators and the teacher.

The most recent news in the newsletter is about the extension of funding by government on preschool education. The website is very good that they have highlighted the list of updated news posted in the website so that members can identify those easily.  Other recent news includes Long Day Care Professional Development Program, New Playground Standards for Australia, Nominations for Education and Care awards, NSW Advocate for Children and young people.

This is a useful website and comprehensive updates on early childhood advocate.