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?

     When I think of early childhood education, I always think of it in my worldview and how it affects me on my level... on my home turf.  I think that we are all very insular in our thinking of early childhood development and don't tend to really consider very far outside of our own programs.  I remember reading on one of our assigned websites to view a statistic about how many children have access to secondary education and the percentage was so low that I, for a moment, felt that it had to be incorrect.  I then realized that if that statistic had only included the United States, the percentage would have been very high.  However, the statistic was WORLD WIDE.  I rarely consider things on a world wide level.  Learning about early childhood education in the world taught me:
.  The

1. That I am really very small and the world is very large.  My day and my life is such a tiny little sliver of what goes on in the world.  My program and the children in my program are just one little, very tiny, piece of early childhood education across the world.  We are not the entire world; we are just a small part of it.

 

 

 

2. That not all programs around the world look like mine.  Not all classrooms look like the classrooms that I picture in my head.  Not all children have supplies and shiny, pretty classrooms.  Many children never even get to see the inside of a traditional, United States cookie cutter type classroom.  I feel that I had never before even considered that education is not just a given around the world like it is here.  It is not a requirement or a right, like it is here.

I have always pictured this...

 

 

But not this...

 

3.  Something must be done.  Early childhood development programs have been shown to be the fundamental building block to future success.  We must work to ensure that every single child has access to this building block to success.  Early childhood education programs should be a right.  It should be a requirement.  It should be something that every single child has access to without question.  This means every single child in the WORLD.  We must work to see that this happens.

 

 

 

My goal is to start to make the steps and to put myself in the position to start working to make this a right and a possibility for every single child born to this world.

 

 

     This week, I looked into the UNESCO website to get a look at who they are and what they do.  I literally knew nothing about this organization, so I felt that I needed to start at the very beginning.  I didn't even know what the acronym stood for.  I learned this week that UNESCO is the United Nations Organization for Education, Science, and Culture.  The headquarters for this organization is located in Paris and there are fifty field offices around the world.  In the USA, there is an office in New York. 
     UNESCO does many different things for many different sectors involving education, science, and culture.  However, this organization also addresses early childhood care and education specifically.  UNESCO advocates for early childhood programs and works to ensure a holistic program that addresses development, health, nutrition, security, and learning.  It's goal is to work to see that all young children have the ability to develop to their fullest potential. 
     UNESCO works to gain access and equity in early childhood programs by expanding and improving early childhood programs especially for the most vulnerable and disadvantaged populations of children.  UNESCO works worldwide to first help the countries recognize the importance of early childhood education, and then to mobilize the resources to provide early childhood education.  UNESCO's stance is that all countries should view early childhood education as part of a basic education.  The greatest difficulty is not convincing countries of this, but in mobilizing the resources to provide it.
     We often see the way that early childhood education works in our country, but seldom think of how it is provided in other countries.  The UNESCO site helps one to get a worldwide picture of early childhood education.  There is even a calendar of events that gives dates and locations for meetings and conferences regarding early childhood education all across the world.

     I have spent the last few weeks looking deeper into the NAEYC website.  I still haven't received a newsletter from the organization, even though I have signed up for it several times.  I spent some time this week looking into the links on the NAEYC website that take me to outside places.  I think that my favorite link is the one that helps me to find accredited programs.  This is such a great tool, especially for parents.  It can help them to find programs that they can be sure follow certain expectations and guidelines.
     I mentioned before that although my program is NAEYC accredited, I really didn't fully know what that meant to me or to my families.  I felt that exploring the NAEYC website could give me a better knowledge of this and that it would help me, not only for this class, but for my job also.
     While exploring the site this week, I did find information that helped me in both areas.  NAEYC has 10 standards and accreditation criteria that must be met by all programs that wish to be NAEYC accredited programs.  These 10 standards were updated in 2006 to not only address programs serving children birth though kindergarten, but also to make sure that standards were more evidence based on what early childhood programs need to be in order to be most effective.  Reading through all of this really helped me to make a connection of equity and excellence and how the NAEYC standards help to ensure both.  The 10 standards address 10 different areas: relationships, curriculum, teaching, assessment of child progress, health, teachers, families, community relationships, physical environment, leadership and management.  Reading through these helped me to understand that if all programs started following standards such as these, it could create a united force that would all be on the same page of providing equity and excellence to children.  These standards and criteria help to ensure best practices in our field.