Groups!

     This week, we took at look at the five stages of team development: forming, storming, norming, performing, and adjourning.  After learning and reading about these stages, I then took a closer look at the adjournment stage and reflected on some of the groups that I have been in and what occurred or did not occur during the adjournment stage.
     I do feel that the higher performing groups were really hard to leave, mainly because trust, respect, and relationships had been built in those groups, which is why they worked so well.  However, I do think that in many of the higher performing groups that I have been a part of, many of us were excited that we had reached our goal, but were not ready to split up as a group.  This often led to my groups deciding to set and pursue a new goal.  We saw that we had worked so well together and this led us to work together on other things instead of adjourning.
     I have left many groups before they ever got off of the ground, and this was easy to do.  I have been in groups in which I didn't agree with the goal that was set.  I may not have been able to deal with so many individuals in a group pursing their own individual goals.  Many times, I have not been able to get past the storming stage and have felt that I didn't want to be a part of a group that seemed to operate in this manner.  Leaving groups that never get past the storming stage has always been very easy for me.
     When I think about closing experiences in groups, I feel like the groups that end in a celebration are the ones that are most memorable for me.  When in groups, you are working very hard to reach a goal.  When that goal is reached, there should be a celebration to mark the fact that the goal has been accomplished.  This is a great way to adjourn with happy and positive memories.
     I feel bad saying this, but I have never had a hard time with adjourning from any of my degree courses and I don't feel that adjourning from my Master's will be any different.  I have never attended any of my graduations and I have never really met any of my fellow students or teacher's face to face.  This makes it very easy to not develop relationships and to not feel as if the others in this same group as me really play a part in my experience.  I am sure that it would be much different if I had actual in-seat classes.

     When reading through other blog postings of my colleagues this week, I find it interesting to hear so many say that there really isn't much conflict at their jobs.  My job feels like constant conflict.  I supervise a group of about 15 other women.  The conflict is rampant.  However, mostly it revolves around who is getting the most break time or office time.  Most of these teachers and aides are stuck in a classroom the entire day.  We are always so short staffed, that break time and office time has really become some kind of myth or legend that is often spoken of, but rarely seen.  While one group is "trapped" in their class, they imagine that the other group is in the teacher's lounge relaxing and really having a great time and getting lots of lesson plans and work caught up on.  This causes conflict between the classrooms.  They keep a close ear and eye out to see just how many minutes each person gets in the teacher's lounge each day and it is normally the subject of most of the complaints that find their way to my office.
     I have tried several different things to remedy this.  I tried doing scheduled break times and scheduled office times.  This was a huge pain because I would spend hours each week trying to figure out a schedule to ensure that each person got two fifteen minute breaks and also an office time.  Then, we would have call-ins and/or people quit, which always threw the schedule right out of the window.  I have even tried having volunteers come in just to give breaks.  No solution that I have seems to last more than a couple of days.  I have tried to convince the classes that their colleagues were in the same boats, but they didn't believe this.  I have tried hiring extra help for the afternoons to relieve staff and get them more office time, but those afternoon workers never stay more than a few weeks.  I have tried moving people around and re-arranging work schedules... nothing ever works out.
     This is frustrating to me because it seems so petty when I compare it to the other things that I have to do every day.  When I have parents coming to me because their child has been molested and I am meeting with children's services and police, and then teachers come in complaining that they only got a ten minute break instead of a fifteen minute break, I almost snap at them.  However, I try really hard to remember that it is not petty to them and that they do deserve to have office times and breaks.  I have just kind of started avoiding the topic and telling them just to do the best that they can do.  Until we can get fully staffed, there isn't a lot that we can do.
     After reading the course material this week, I feel like the answer and solution lies more with the staff members than with me.  They are looking to me for an answer that I don't have.  I need them to work together in order to realize that they are all in the same position.  I wonder if I need to have a meeting and have all of them communicate with each other and work together to brainstorm possible solutions.  Then, it wouldn't be so much about who wins and who looses, or who is getting their way.  Instead, they will be working together for a solution in which everyone is a winner.  If I can get them all communicating and brainstorming a broad range of solutions, then new ideas and solutions could arise from this conflict.  Who knows?  Any ideas?

My Communication Style

     Wow!  This one really worried me this week.  I have often been told that I am intimidating and aggressive and this is not something that I am proud of.  I have worked on it a lot and have gotten a lot better as I have aged.  I had my husband, son, and a coworker all take this assessment to see how theirs compared to mine.  I did this because my husband knows me better than anyone on this earth, because my son and I constantly but heads and he states that I am intimidating, and because I wanted to get a perspective from a coworker.
     When I did the self assessments, I got a 44 on anxiety, a 66 on moderate, and a 39 on listening styles.  The anxiety score shows that I have a mild anxiety in some situations and that I am at ease in others and that I don't worry a great deal about communicating.  This is true.  I have spent a lot of years trying to refine the art of communication and I have gotten rather comfortable with communicating effectively.  However, I do get nervous when I have to speak to those that I don't already know well and don't have relationships with.
     The score of 66 put me in the moderate range of verbal aggressiveness and said that this showed a good balance between being respectful and arguing fairly.  It shows that I can attack the facts, rather than the person holding the facts.
     The score of 39 on listing styles did not state which group that would put me in.  Reading through the groups, I feel that I would fall between a group one and a group two.  I am very action oriented, which people can find intimidating.  I am also people oriented, which can cloud proper judgment. 
     Much to my surprise, all three people taking these assessments had scores very similar to mine.  Some of them varied by a couple of points, but I was still in the same boxes.  I learned more by talking to these people, especially my son.  I couldn't believe that his scores for me were not way different than mine, since we disagree so often.  I asked him how this could be, since he always states that I am so intimidating.  He said that I intimidate him because I am so smart!  That really made me laugh out loud.  I am apparently not intimidating to him because I am aggressive.  Rather, he knows that I am going to be tough to argue with because I am no fool!  His teenage manipulations won't work on me.  That really gave me a tickle!  He also always tells me that I don't ever listen, yet his scores did not reflect this about me.  When I asked him about this, he said that what he means is that he can't ever get me to change my mind.  What a little scamp!  My husband and coworker both stated that I am a very strong communicator, but that I am also very kind and very fair.  That made me feel good.  My husband said that people are intimidated by me because I am a good communicator and this leaves people feeling unarmed and worried that they will not perform at the same standards that I set. 
     I am glad that these three feel that I am a good communicator.  However, even my own boss has told me that people find me intimidating.  I want to be a real tough gal communicator, but this does me no good if I am unapproachable or if people are intimidated by me.  My communication goals are to 1. Soften up, 2. Listen more than I talk, and 3. Soften up!

     When I think about different culture groups that I am around, I have to admit that there is really not a wide variety of cultures that I am exposed to.  As a child, I was rarely around those of other cultures.  I live in a very rural town with all white residents.  It always has been that way.  Most of the families are pretty similar.  Of course we are all different, but there is not a wide array of diversity.  I work about 40 miles away and closer to the city.  Where I work, there are people of other languages, ethnicities, languages, etc., but still not anything like the diversity found within cities.  I was going to have a friend of mine (who is African American) watch my eight year old son, but I was very worried.  I figured that he would be like, "Oh, so that is how black people take out their trash"... or, "Wow!  Black people eat chips, too"... or many other things like this.  Not that he has been taught anything negative about other ethnicities, but he has never been exposed to those who are different than him.  It would be a wonderful learning experience for him, but I didn't want to put my friend through that!  My childhood was much like that.  I had no clue how people from other socioeconomic statuses, religions, ethnicities, sexual orientations, etc. lived because I was never able to build relationships with people from other cultures because my town is so rural, Christian, and white.
     I do talk to people from other cultures differently.  I talk to children in a louder tone and in a very sing song voice.  I constantly touch them, pat their backs, and rub their arms and backs as I talk to them.  I have some Christian friends that I don't cuss around and some fellow cursing friends that I cuss like the devil around!  I am open and honest with my husband, but not so with others.  I am a professional business woman at work and I use a lot of logic over emotion.  When I am with my family, I use more emotion than logic.  I have a loud, boisterous friend and I notice that I get loud and boisterous when I communicate with her.  I think that we start learning at a young age (from our experiences) the different ways that it is considered to be acceptable to communicate with others.  We also catch on to the ways that others wish for us to communicate with them and also we learn what seems to be effective.  This means adapting the way that we communicate, based on who we are communicating with.

 

 
       This week, the assignment was to watch a segment of a show with the sound turned off and then watch it again with the sound turned on.  I decided to watch part of an episode for Fuller House.  My children have been watching it and I had yet to see an episode.  So, I turned off the volume.  The character of Kimmie entered the house with a really good looking man.  I tried really hard to figure out what they were talking about, but I couldn't.  The man's facial expressions showed a lot of confusion and showed that he felt like what she was saying didn't make a lot of sense.  Kimmie goes upstairs and DJ walks in.  She face shows shock that someone is in the house, but then she smiles and sticks her hand out for a handshake.  I could tell by the exchange between the two that they were making introductions.  DJ talks to this man and I can tell that she is telling him to follow her upstairs.  The man seems confused and I could tell that there was some mistake made; that DJ had made an incorrect assumption as to why the man was at the house.  He follows her upstairs to the bathroom and starts to take off his shirt.  She looks horrified and shocked and puts her hands up to tell him to stop.  When I go back and watch it with the sound on, I see that Kimmie brought this man home from a dating service to meet DJ.  DJ had called a plumber to fix the toilet and when she walks into the room, she assumes that this is the plumber.  Although I could tell that there was a huge misunderstanding from watching without sound, I really didn't know what the misunderstanding was about, until I watched with sound.  I was amazed at just how much I really could pick up without the verbal aspect.  The verbal communication helped to really fine tune my understanding and provide greater detail, but I pick up the basics of what was transpiring, just by watching facial expression and body language.

Effective Communicator
     When I think of a person in my life that I feel is a wonderful communicator, I think of our Human Resources consultant at work.  I find that I think of someone that is better at certain things than I am.  This woman is always fair.  She is always calm.  She listens well and waits until someone is done talking.  She even jots things down as you speak, so that she can remember to come back to things that you have said after you are done talking.  She is kind and she remains objective.  Most of all, she can speak very calmly and never lets emotions overtake her.  I think that this is what I struggle with the most.  I often become very emotional and this causes me to behave in ways that make me completely ineffective as a communicator.  Once I become emotional, I have lost any ground that I might have had to be able to communicate effectively.  This woman that I speak of never becomes emotional.  She is kind, calm, fair, unbiased, professional, unemotional, and listens very well.  These things are all things that I feel make her a very effective communicator and someone that I would like to be able to model when I need to communicate with others.

 

     My hope is that we can all live and work together in harmony.  My hope is for peace, love, and understanding.  World peace is not too much to hope for, right?!  When I work with families from diverse backgrounds, my hope is that I am able to express how much I respect them and how much I truly want what is best for them.  My hope is that I can do my part to help families without causing offense in any way.  My hope is that one day every single baby in this world can be born on equal ground with every other  human in this world.
     My goal for the early childhood field would be that every family is taught their importance in their child's education.  It is true that parents/family are the most important person in a child's education.  As educators, we can be so much more effective with the engagement of families.  I feel that if families are truly engaged and truly see their importance, then they can bring so much more to the field to educate us on their cultures and make us even more aware of each unique family dynamic.  This would really go a long way to helping us to understand and promote equity, social justice, and support for diversity.
     Thanks so much to each of my classmates and to Dr. Davis for a wonderful learning experience this course.  I have learned so much from each of you and the things that I have learned I will carry with me for my entire life.  Go spread the message, my friends!

 

 

 

Albania

 

 

 

I chose Albania as the country that my new family would be coming from as they entered into my program.  I just pulled up a list of all countries and it was the first to catch my eye!  I had several ideas as to what I would do to prepare myself and my program for the family that would be coming from Albania.  I think that the first would be to set about educating myself and my staff.  We would need to find out as much as we could about Albania, like the government, history, capital, politics, ethnicities, educational programs, languages, and other cultural features.  I feel like it would be a great idea to contact the previous program in Albania and talk to the staff there about a typical day in their program, to get a good idea of what the child is used to.  I also think that it would be a good idea to meet with the family before the start date and ask them to share with us things about living in Albania.  We could also have the family meet with staff and our current families and even answer questions if they are open to that idea.  These things would help us to learn as much as possible about this family before we started to try to provide services to them.  I would then take everything that we learned and try to integrate the same types of things into our current program.  I would try to find way to include pictures, objects, toys, foods, languages, and music from Albania in order to try to make the family feel at ease and to teach everyone in our program about our new family from Albania!

I think that these preparations will educated us in such a manner as to be able to provide the best services possible to this family.  I also think that it would teach us about how important it is to discover these things about all of our families... not just those from another country.  Just imagine if we worked this hard to find out these types of things about our current families!

     When I think of my life and instances in which I have experienced bias, oppression, discrimination, and other things of this nature, I automatically think of my childhood.  It seems like once I entered the school system, I became the target of these things, mainly because of the fact that I lived in extreme poverty.  Children always laughed at my clothing and would say that I probably didn't take baths.  They would make fun of my hand-me-down clothing and say things about me probably being on food stamps and welfare (which I was).  Adults were always giving me "the look" and I could always tell that they would prefer that their child never ask to have me over.  They wanted their child to be nice to me, but prayed that their child would never want to be my friend.  If everything ever came up missing, it was assumed that I took it (because I was poor).  These types of things were daily occurrences.
     Then I tried to think about times that I was discriminated against that had nothing to do with my socioeconomic status and I was reminded of an event that occurred when I was in the fifth or sixth grade.  I had been invited to a church event by a friend.  We were in the pastor's home waiting on his daughter, who was the youth group leader, to get ready.  We were sitting in the living room and had made a game of putting our feet up on their coffee table.  Any time that I would put my feet up on the table, one of the other girls would kick my feet off.  It started to get rough and a bit tense and finally one of the girls said, "you can't put your feet on this table unless you are a Christian."  I had never even heard of the word and really didn't understand what was going on... just that I was not included in this group of girls for some reason beyond my control.
   When I think of instances like this, I try to recall the feeling that I had during those times.  I felt embarrassed and ashamed, like I had done something wrong, but I really didn't know what it was.  I felt angry that I was mistreated for things that I had no control over.  I desperately wanted to belong, but just couldn't figure out what these other children wanted me to change in order to be part of their group.  I felt powerless.  I felt like the world was so unfair.
     I think that the only way to change these types of incidents is to change attitudes, assumptions, and values.  Children are socialized into treating others this way.  They are taught (whether intentionally or not) who belongs in the "in" groups and who does not.  In order to create greater equity for everyone, we have to change how we treat others and we have to change the messages that we send to our children about how others are to be treated.

                                Microaggressions
     Learning about Microaggressions this week has helped me to see that I have been doing this my entire life.  I do get into a cab and wonder where the driver is from, simply because he make look different or talk differently than I do.  I never even consider that the driver's family could possibly have been in the United States longer than my family.  I just automatically assume that the driver is from another country.  Listening to the speaker on the video this week made me realize how frustrating and offensive this would be.  Especially when you have to hear it over and over again from people with white skin and who speak English without any type of accent.  I would hate people looking at me and assuming that I don't belong in this country or that I am from another country, based purely on what they see.
   

 

 

 

 

I also think that I face microaggression, maybe in a reverse form.  I work in a position that is very white collar.  Most of the people that I meet with have come from well to do families and have degrees earned from fancy colleges.  Most of them have never known need.  We serve families that are in extreme poverty and face all of the hardships that are associated with spending generations in the cycle of poverty.  Unlike many of the people that we work with, there are a few of us that grew up in poverty.  We know some of the challenges faced by our families because we have faced them ourselves.  There are a few of us that know what it is like to be hungry and to be sick and in pain and not be able to afford to go to the doctor.  There are a few of us that earned our degrees by working two or three jobs while taking classes.  However, many of the upper management and administrative workers that I work with have never known what these things are like.  Everything that they know about poverty, they have learned in text books.  This causes them to lump everyone in poverty into a single category.  The believe that every one of our families have the same exact life, that is demonstrative of every stereotype associated with those in poverty.  Not only does this cause constant microaggressions at meetings when they refer to "these people", but also when they follow that up with a generalization that is just a stereotype of people in poverty.

While this is offensive and is an example of microaggressions, it is even more offensive that they assume that all of us in these meetings have come from the more affluent type of society that they have.  This is where I say that it is almost a reverse example of microaggressions.  These upper level management and administrator people are always trying to help us understand how "these people" live and how hard "these people" have it.  They assume when they look at me (an intelligent, white, educated woman in a business suit) that I have never experienced poverty.  They lecture about how we need to realize just what "these people" go through.  It is offensive to me that they assume that I don't know.  It is offensive to me that they feel like they can explain something to me that I have experienced since birth and they have never known anything other than having all of their needs met.  I may not be considered as a marginalized group (as a white, middle class, business woman) yet they are looking at me and assuming just by what they see that they know how I feel and what I think and believe.  I feel like this is a microaggression (even if a bit in reverse).

 

     I talked to two co-workers and also a homosexual friend about how they would define culture and diversity.  Although all three are different ethnicities and from different walks of life, they still had very similar answers.
     They defined culture as a person's ethnicity and their traditions, such as the foods they eat, clothes they wear, languages they speak, music they listen to, etc.  They all talked about diversity as all of these different cultures living together and accepting of each other's differences.
     In talking with each of these people, I realize that they are spitting out what they have been hearing in the last few years about culture and diversity.  They were giving the standard textbook, politically correct answers that we have all been taught over the past few years to say in order to be able to claim that we celebrate diversity and are multicultural competent people.  They are aware of the surface aspects only.  I was the same way before starting this course.  I realize that most people think that they show multicultural competence and that they promote diversity, but they are still above the surface.  I think that this course has taught me to examine more than just the culture that we can see with our eyes.  I have learned that there is so much to a person's culture that we would never even know about without getting to know that person.  I now realize that culture is so complex and makes a person who they are.  I think that all of the people that I talked to last week about culture and diversity are still on the surface.  They haven't been challenged to examine their own culture and haven't been enlightened to the fact that culture runs so much deeper than a persons color, language, etc.

My Big Fork and Spoon, My Recipe Binder, and a Memory Card of Pictures
  
     I think that many of us think often about things like this.  For me, it is if my house were to catch fire and burn to the ground.  What would I try to take?  I always tell myself that I would grab every picture off of the wall along my way out of the door and grab every picture album that I could get my hands on.  Even if I couldn't, my mom and others have pictures that I could always make copies of.  So, I have always just decided that I would just want my husband and kids out safe with me.  Everything else could burn to the ground.
     When considering if I were to become a refugee, displaced to a new country, my thoughts were exactly the same... I just wanted my husband and kids.  As long as I had that, then I could care less about any object.  I discussed this scenario with my teenage son, to see what objects he thought we should take that represent our family culture.  He said our tea pan!  It was so funny to me that this was the first thing that came to his mind.  We have an old, battered sauce pan that we use only to cook tea on the stove.  When my husband and I first got married, I didn't want to ruin any of my new pans by cooking tea in them.  My mom gave me her old tea pan, that had also been my grandmother's tea pan.  It is just a cheap, old pan.  It means nothing to me and I would never take it anywhere with me.  Yet it was the first thing that came to his mind.  The next thing that he chose would also be something that I would choose.  He brought up the big fork and spoon.
     The big fork and spoon have hung in my kitchen for many, many years and they have a funny story behind them.  It is a long story, but I will shorten it.  My husband and I loved watching Everybody Loves Raymond.  In one of our most favorite episodes, Frank and Marie had a huge fight over a large wooden fork and spoon that had hung in their kitchen for years.  We LOVED this episode.  Many years later, my husband's grandmother passed away and we had the task of clearing out her house.  We were the first humans up in her attic in 30 years or more.  It was dark, dirty, and scary!  In a corner of this attic, buried under a lifetime of clutter, we found this large, wooden fork and spoon.  It has been in our kitchen ever since.  It is an inside joke for my husband and I.  Most people see it hanging in our kitchen and probably question our sense of style.  It is special to my husband and I, though and will probably be with us until our dying day.
     The other thing that I would take would be a memory card with every single picture that I could fit on it.  I would be sad if I lost all of my pictures and the memories and feelings that looking at old pictures can evoke.  I sometimes forget what my children looked like when they were babies.  I sometimes forget funny ways that they pronounced words.  I forget little funny things that they did.  Looking at old pictures reminds me of these things and brings a special feeling, both sweet and bittersweet.  I would hate to forever loose those memories and feeling.  That is why I would want a memory card with all of my pictures on it. 
     I had a hard time coming up with my last item.  My son's girlfriend joked that I should say food.  We are huge foodies in our house.  We always put out a huge spread and every occasion revolves around food.  I didn't think that food would be a good answer, but still couldn't think of a good third object.  Late last night it occurred to me how to bring our love of food with us.  I have a binder with all of our favorite recipes.  We try new recipes all the time.  If it isn't great, I just throw the recipe away.  If it is wonderful, then we call it a "keeper" and I put the recipe in my binder.  My sons joke that "if" they ever move out, then I will have to make them a copy of my recipe binder to take with them, so that they will know how to make all of their favorites.  Our family culture centers a lot around food, meals shared, and treasured recipes.  This binder makes a perfect third item.  I would probably even take it over the large fork and spoon.
     If I showed up in this country that I had to take refuge in and was told that I could only take one of these items, I would be disappointed.  However, I would gladly give up all three items if it meant that my family could still be together and safe.  I would keep my pictures and give up the large fork and spoon and recipe binder.
     I really realized that in our family, we really treasure memories and making memories.  I often tell my husband that this is our time to be making memories.  We are also big on making and sharing food together.  However, nothing is more important in our family culture than being together.  As long as our family is safe and intact, nothing else matters.  We would all gladly give up any object in order to keep us all safe and together.  That is our family culture.

When I Think of Research...
    Everyone that knows me also knows that I love to read, refer to, and quote research.  I love to read about different research and about the results.  I am always forwarding interesting research articles to my spouse and friends (I am pretty sure they do not read them).  However, the idea of performing the research is a different story.  I want someone else to do all of the work and then just fill me in on what they find out.  I am a curious person with a lot of questions and research helps me to look up and read about the subject to get my answers.  Although I learned a lot in this class, I find that I am still very much on the side of loving research, but not wanting to be involved in the process of performing said research.  The final result interests me very much, but I just do not have any interested in the process of it.
     The biggest insight that I gained was that one study does not have to answer the big question.  I think that research makes many people nervous because they feel like they have to be able to have earth shattering results that will change the world.  Most of us want that.  My insight was that this is just not realistic.  The answers to the really big questions actually come from breaking that big question down into several smaller questions and tackling it a little at a time.  It may take hundreds of studies to answer one question.  We have to learn to accept this and even embrace it because tackling it a little at a time can actually enlighten us to a new avenue or show us that we need to be looking in a different direction.
  In fact, this enlightenment also changed my ideas of the nature of research and about planning, designing, and conducting research.  It also showed me my biggest challenge and how to encounter it.  For me it was all about learning that research is not about one study that answers it all.  It is about many, many smaller studies all working off of each other... like peeling an onion one layer at a time until the big picture is revealed.
     As an early childhood professional, I have learned that in order to find my answer, I must be able to define what I am looking for.  I can't just research which kinds of teachers are more effective; I have to be able to define what an effective teacher is.  I can't ask which children will be more successful; I have to be able to define what successful is.

European Early Childhood Education Journal

     I decided to visit this site to explore some areas that are popular in early childhood education research in other areas of the world.  When exploring this site, I noticed that it was possible to pull up the research articles that were the most read.  This intrigued me.  I wanted to see what articles were of the most interest to visitors of this site.  The most read research articles looked like this:

• Make believe play vs academic skills
• Dynamics of early childhood spaces- Opportunity for outdoor play
• Influence of play context and adult attitudes on young children's physical risk taking during outdoor play
• Perspectives of early childhood teachers on parent teacher partnerships in 5 European countries
• The outdoor environment in Norwegian kindergartners as pedagogical space for toddlers' play, learning, and development
• Emotional complexity of attachment interactions in nursery children
• Children and outdoor environment
• Affordances in outdoor environments and children's physically active play in preschool

     I realized that many of the research articles are also topics that are being researched in the United States.  There were a lot of articles that dealt with learning through play versus academics, family partnerships, emotional attachments, and also a lot of articles that focused on the zero through three age.  These are all areas that I have noticed are areas of focus for us here in this country.  What was most surprising to me was the number of articles focusing on the outdoors and outdoor play.  My own director has talked to me about taking the classroom outside and ordering items that can be used for outdoor learning, so it wasn't a new topic for me.  I just couldn't believe how popular of a topic that this was on the European Early Childhood Education Journal website.  I was looking at the most read articles, and at least one out of three of the articles on the list were examining some facet of  the outdoor environment on early childhood education.  If I could have guessed the most popular topic that would pop up, I would never in a million years have guessed this.  It was really surprising and interesting to me that outdoor play is starting to garner such interest in the world of early childhood education research.

Autism and Vaccinations

     This is what I would research.  I want clear answers and I know that many other people on this earth do as well.  I remember for a while reading research that linked autism with vaccinations.  Then, this was shown to be incorrect and now the stance is that there is no link between the two.  However, I constantly read statistics that make me feel that maybe there really is a link.  I think that there are a lot of people in pain.  They had a child who seemed to be developing normally and then, just out of the blue, they felt as if that child was taken from them.  They want answers and they deserve answers.  I have very educated friends, who are aware that research is now telling us that autism is not caused by vaccinations.  However, they will all swear that their child was perfectly normal, they took them to get their shots, and the next day that child was autistic.  I don't know the answers, but I would sure like to.  If I could research anything, it would be to find out 100% for sure if autism is linked to vaccines.  If not, my next research would be to find out what is the cause then, if not the vaccines.  I have parents that I work with that are too scared to get their children vaccinated.  I know that I am supposed to explain to them how beneficial these vaccines are and how their is no link between them and autism.  However, what if I am wrong?  Could all of the people that swear their child became autistic immediately after vaccinations be wrong?  I am not confident that there is not a link.  I want to be confident and sure and I am neither of these things.

Reasearch Question????????????

     Hello, friends!  I am having a bit of a struggle trying to decide on a good, manageable research question.  I am very interested in learning about whether center based options or home visiting options are more successful for families and children.  I have read that center based options are more effective.  However, in my program we have both and I see that the home visitors work more in depth with the family and seem to have a better impact on helping the family to improve their life situations, which would seem to be more life long and also to have a greater impact on the success of the child and the family.  So, my question would be which one is right?  Does being in a center have a greater impact on future success for that child, or home visiting?
     What really worries me is that this is too large of a topic.  I am worried that it is too broad or too general and that I will have a difficult time with it.  However, our instructor seems to think that this is a workable question.  What do you guys think?  Is it manageable?  Is there a way to focus it down a bit more?