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.