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 informed 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 will meet you.

Blog: 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.

The Personal Side of Bias, Prejudice, and Oppression

When I was in my late teens, there was a corner store that my cousins and I went to. We were not the rowdy type of teens, we were taught to always be respectful and conduct ourselves as though our parents have eyes everywhere. When we walked into the store the Asian man behind the counter yelled and told us to hurry up and buy. We looked around to see if he could possibly be talking to anyone else but it was only us who were in the store at the time. We decided to ignore his comment/demand and continued to look through the store for junk food. The man was eyeing us very hard. He told us to hurry up or get out of his store and we better not steal because he is watching us and he will call the cops if we give him any trouble. At that moment my oldest cousin was getting angry because we did not deserve the way we were being treated. We never cause trouble but we get treated as if we steal and/or do worse. I told my cousin to lets not spend our money here and leave, but before we could my cousin being the outspoken person she is told the man that because we are Black does not mean we will steal or destroy and she said it again in Chinese which shocked the man. He looked confused and we left the store.

Making the assumption that everyone that is Black does wrong is wrong. I do not like to be judged by the color of my skin and I think it is unjust to treat anyone the way they do not want to be treated. As far as my feelings were concerned, I was bothered by what was said and how we were treated. I started thinking about my mom, dad, and grandparents and knowing they may have been treated worse when they were my age. Sometimes incidents like that make you a stronger person.

For an incident like the one I experienced to change, the Asian man does not need to make assumptions based on skin complexion. If he wasn’t quick to pre-judge us he would have gotten our service. It makes me wonder how he has treated others that have come before and after us.