Professional Hopes and Goals and THANK-YOU note

• One hope that you have when you think about working with children and families who come from diverse backgrounds

When I think about working with children and families who come from diverse backgrounds, I hope that children can be free from struggling with cultural discontinuity and identify who they are rather than feel lost about their identities due to cultural discontinuity.

• One goal you would like to set for the early childhood field related to issues of diversity, equity, and social justice

Related to my hope above and to issues of diversity, equity, and social justice, I would like to set up a goal that I would support children to bridge up their family culture with the dominant culture by getting to know children's family culture, including their cultural background, their economic and political status, their religious belief, parents' expectations of their children at school and the like; by creating a safe and caring setting for children to feel comfortable, confident, secure, respected and at ease, and a sense of belonging; by recognizing and honoring children's home cultures and getting parents involved in the classroom to introduce their own cultures to other children; etc..

• A brief note of thanks to your colleagues

I would like to take this opportunity to say "THANK YOU" to my instructor Dr. Ferrari and my colleagues. Thank you to Dr. Ferrari for providing your responses to our initial posts, and your feedbacks to our responses on the discussion board as well as to our assignments. Due to your suggestion, I can see the deeper sides of related questions in this course. Thank you to my colleagues for your insightful posts and responses in the discussion board, and your amazing blogs as well, both of which give me more new insights about the same questions. I have learned a lot from you about diversity, equity and social justice. I hope we can meet each other in the new course and wish you good luck! Thank you again for learning together!

Welcoming Families From Around the World

 Imagine the following scenario:

You are working in an early childhood setting of your choice—a hospital, a child care center, a social service agency. You receive word that the child of a family who has recently emigrated from a country you know nothing about will join your group soon. You want to prepare yourself to welcome the child and her family. Luckily, you are enrolled in a course about diversity and have learned that in order to support families who have immigrated you need to know more than surface facts about their country of origin.

 

• The name of “your” family’s country of origin

The name of the new family's country of origin is Cambodia. This family has immigrated to America before their children were born. There are three children and the girl in our class is the first child in this family.

• At least five ways in which you will prepare yourself to be culturally responsive towards this family

In order to prepare myself to be culturally responsive towards this family, firstly I will search on the Internet for information about Cambodia's history, culture, political and economic status, religion, and the like. Second, I will look for information about Cambodian families in America to get general ideas about their life in America. Third, I will consult my colleagues about their experience of cultural response to immigrant families. Fourth, I will have a conference with this family to find out more details about their family culture, including political and economic background, their belief and religion, their expectations of their children in school, their home language, their cultural dos and don'ts, and the like. Last but not least, I will learn attend more workshop to learn more about the knowledge of the third culture.

• A brief statement describing in what ways you hope that these preparations will benefit both you and the family

Through these ways that I described above, I think I can better prepare myself to be culturally responsive to this family and the other families alike. I could learn what their dominant culture and their family culture are, so that I could try to bridge their family culture up with our school culture, community culture and even the new local culture which they now are getting to know about in China. From the information I get from the Internet, colleagues, and this family, I could avoid the occurrences of stereotyping concepts; I could avoid being unconsciously racial microaggressive with good intentions; I could cater for what the child emotionally and physically need; I can build up relationships with the child and the family to support the child's development in all aspects.

The Personal Side of Bias, Prejudice, and Oppression

Bias, prejudice and oppression exists anywhere in our daily life, which sometimes are so tiny that we might ignore but feel uncomfortable with. For example, every time when I go to the public toilet, there exists a phenomenon that we, women always have to line up in a long queue to wait for their turns but men don't need to. This is one example of gender bias because the physical differences between female and male are not considered, such as the ratio of female and male, the different time spans that women and men need, and the like. Equity does not just mean equality. The equal number of female toilets and male toilets means the lack of recognitions of the differences between female and male, which leads to inequity. I feel always embarrassed and uncomfortable when I am lining up for my turn and a man would pass by and give a surprising look. I learn from some news that in some places in China, such as Zhuhai and Taiwan, some policies have been implemented to build up more female toilets to ensure the equity between female and male. I hope in more places the government can take such measures to diminish inequity.

Practicing Awareness of Microaggressions

During lunch time, Ms. Beeman, an American teacher, came to our classroom to take on her lunch duty while she was not the classroom teacher in our class. Lassya, an Indian girl, was eating her lunch with her right hand in my class. When Ms. Beeman witnessed this, she went to get a spoon for Lassya and said, "Please use the spoon, it is good manners to use a spoon and it won't make your hands dirty." In this example, Ms. Beeman was not the classroom teacher in this class, which means that she does not know much about the children in this class and about their family culture and tradition, either. She does not know that Lassya was from India where eating with hands is one of the culture. As to Lassya, when she heard that eating with hands was not appropriate, this would make her feel confused about what she had been doing in her family and feel lost about who she was. The microaggression happened because Ms. Beeman did not know much about the child and did not take into consideration different cultures of eating habits. When I observed this, I felt embarrassed for Lassya, and sorry that I did not inform the teacher of Lassya's case before hand.

My observation experiences this week affect my perception of the effects of discrimination, prejudice and stereotypes on people. I realize that actually every minute our own beliefs, culture, tradition, and way of life, etc, affect our ways of communication with others and views on people and about things happening around. If we don't hold an open-minded attitude and get to know more about different cultures, we might impose our discriminative, prejudiced and stereotypical views on people, which cause intentionally or unintentionally microaggression towards others and show inequity.