3
Consequences of Learning About International
Early Childhood Education
1. One of the primary things that I learned while
studying the international field of early childhood education was the
similarities amongst the countries. From the various articles that I read, it
seems that everyone is concerned with providing quality education
opportunities. Because of the internet, all countries have access to the
research that points to the importance of early childhood education and have
taken steps to improve things for their youngest population. Some countries
address this issue by raising the base pay for the teachers of this age group.
Other countries look to develop better home to school connections in order to
increase the learning opportunities available to their children.
2. The realization of the previously discussed item
led to the realization that I had been operating under an unintentional bias.
Prior to this class I tended to think about early childhood education as though
we in America had cornered the market on understanding the importance of it. I
now realize that that was a very wrong perception on my part; countries all
over the world not only embrace the importance of educating young children, but
are taking steps to improve their lives in a variety of ways. This recognition
of my own bias has also made me more sensitive to others’ biases. For instance,
when my colleague in Thailand mentioned that she and her co-workers were at
odds with the families in her school because the culture does not teach the
young children to responsible for themselves, but the teachers were trying to
establish this mindset in their classroom. It bothered me a little that, rather
than contacting their Thai counterparts to see how they dealt with the issue,
they just told the parents that they needed to stop doing everything for their
children and make them more responsible for their own care. (Doni had stated that
it was not unusual for parents to continue to dress and even feed their
children as late as third grade or so.) It seems to me that this shows a
disregard for the culture and sends a message that says we know better than the
parents. It would be different if this message was coming from a Thai teacher,
but because it is coming from American teachers, it could come across as
dismissive.
3. The other thing that I learned in this course
is, although information can be accessed quite readily from various countries,
communication with people outside of the country is not always easy.
Apparently, certain networks do not accept messages from outside of the US as
well as others; so it was a learning process to find what would work and what
wouldn’t. This learning curve made it more difficult to establish contacts from
other countries.
My goal is to establish even more
contacts from various countries in order to have a more global understanding of
my profession.
