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.