Professional Hopes and Goals

          One hope that I have when working with children and families who come from diverse backgrounds is for programs to respect, value, and learn the practices and policies of cultural for all children and families in their community. I also hope that they advocate for local, state, and federal policies that support the ability of early childhood programs to offer high quality, and diverse education for all children.

One goal I would like to set for the early childhood field related to issues of diversity, equity, and social justice is to commit to ongoing reflection of cultural difference that makes a difference of the attitudes, beliefs, and practice in the classroom in the early childhood education. I also hope to engage families, children, and to the community. I also hope to inform and to respond to the social and cultural backgrounds   of children and families.

To all my colleagues it has been a pleasure of working with all of you. I really enjoyed these eight weeks of learning from your discussion board, comments, and responses. I wish all my colleagues much success and I hope to see you again. Best wishes to all of you until we meet again.

Welcoming Families From Around the World

I chose Russia to be my new family's country of origin. I do not know anything about this culture and would love to learn more about it. Working in an early childhood center, some things I would do to prepare myself for the arrival of this child and family would be:

-Read up on the country history and government and learn about the traditions, culture, education systems, food, pop culture, and music.

-Include Russian children's stories and books in my class library and put out the food and dress representative of the country in the Dramatic Play area.

-Learn some basic phrases and words in the language like sit down, paper, crayons, scissors, bathroom, hello, etc.

-Print out labels in the written language to post around the room to accompany the labels in English and Spanish.

-Purchase popular Russian children's songs and include them into the curriculum.

I hope that by researching this country and setting up the classroom to include some of the things the child possibly saw in previous classrooms would be welcoming to the child and family. That they would see I was open and willing to help with the transition and with the education of their child. I hope they would see that me and the class were happy to have them be a part of our class community. I do not want to appear to be trying too hard and fake, so I would not bombard them with too much enthusiasm. Moving to another country is hard enough, so I would hope they could find some peace knowing their child was in an environment that celebrated her and not ignored her.