Getting to know your international contacts Part 2

As a part of this assignment, I visited Harvard University's "Global Children's Initiative" website to explore its site thoroughly. The website was quite outstanding with supplying information on how Center on the Developing Child place its support throughout the world. After browsing the site, I learned a quite few things. A main key of Global Children's Initiative is building and training global educators, leaderships, policy makers, individual researchers, and insitutions that are focusing on early childhood.

First, Harvard University and its Center on the Developing Child take an endeavor across the world to educate and model the framework to build research/work to address the health and developmental needs of the children.

Second, Center on the Developing Child contributes partial funds to Un Buen Comienzo ("A Good Start") in Chile. Un Buen Comienzo is a project that gives an opportunity to improve early childhood education to four to six years olds and teacher professional development. This project has a goal to use its four demonstrations to help approximately sixty schools.

(Dr. Jack Shonkoff)

Third, there was a first-ever “World Conference on Early Childhood Care and Education: Building the Wealth of Nations,” conference hosted by UNESCO (Russian Federation) in Moscow this past fall 2010. Dr. Jack Shonkoff was the keynote of the conference.  This was a great opportunity for professionals to get together to learn and discuss venues to develop policy and practice.  In this website, it stated: 

"According to a UNICEF report in 2006, more than 30 governments had established national early childhood development policies, and over 70 countries had some type of national commission to coordinate such programs across ministries and sectors. However, much remains to be done: More than half of the world’s governments still do not have any formal policy or coordination mechanism in place related to early childhood development"

This inspired me. It was wonderful to learn that there are Early Childhood advocates across the world and how people come together regardless their backgrounds to pave a better future for young children.

Poverty struck everywhere including United States, but at vary degree of severity. For most part of the world, poverty bonded to people and that hindered many opportunity for growth.  From what I read, policy and practice have not yet craved in stones for more than half of the world. This means that the equity and excellence of the early childhood education are in a very different position in these countries than it is in United States and a few other well-developed countries.

I certainly hope to see thriving policy and practice in Early Childhood Education in these parts of the world with robust growth and successes. Perhaps, their policy and practice will be much more defined with stability that we would ever imagine.

I was disappointed to find that the audio interview with Dr. Jack Shonkoff did not come with transcript. I would have liked to know what the interview was all about.

Sharing Web Resources

Save the Children is an international website that provide information on how the organization supports families and children across the world. For this assignment, I decided that I would like to share a resource called Campaigns to Help Children in Need (http://www.savethechildren.org/site/c.8rKLIXMGIpI4E/b.6147403/k.3306/Campaigns_to_Help_Children_in_Need.htm). Because this information is relevant to my current professional development, I am learning much more about how children's lives are being impacted by economists, politicans, and neuroscientists. At a point, I did not realize how much children's lives are easily flourished or destroyed.

Campaigns to Help Children in Need emphasized that when children's needs are being met, they will be more likely to survive and success. Save the Children organization quoted: 

"Of the children under the age of 5 who die each year, almost 2/3 could be saved with the simple low-cost interventions delivered by health workers in clinics and in their communities. With attention from developing country governments and donor nations, we can help them bring lifesaving care to more hard-to-reach communities and make the survival of children a reality worldwide."

This statement caught my attention. It clearly named politicans, economists, and neuroscientists by using 'governments' and 'donor nations.'  These professionals have the "power" to make the differences in children's lives by making policies, creating new vaccinations, and making investments to increase the quality of their lives. This made me realized that every nation needs economists, neuroscientists, and politicans who advocate children and step up to make the differences. Their positions are highly recognized and demanded.

Our home country is undertaking a major recession that is impacting the young children in every way such as nutrition, education, lifestyle, home circumstance, and so forth. Although our country may not show the worst aspect of children's lives as other countries that are shown through Save the Children organization, I feel that it is imperative for our country to encourage economists, neuroscientists, and politicans who are strong advocates for early childhood education to fight for our children by using evidences and models that demonstrate the significant differences between increase investments and lack of investments in early childhood education.

I am starting to believe in advocating by choosing right people (economists, neuroscientists, and politicans) as Save the Children stated, "urgent action to implement quality education and build peace in conflict-affected countries." Keep in mind that conflict-affected countries are common across the world, but it does not mean to exclude countries like United States. We need to recognize the "conflict" and its impact on children.

Getting to Know Your International Contacts—Part 1

For this assignment, I studied http://www.childhoodpoverty.org/index.php?action=countryo and selected to focus on India. A good friend of mine is the leading reason why I am interested in learning about India. He is an Indian and a great storyteller.

The poverty in India stumped me. Apparently, I did not realize that India has 1.03 billions people residing in the country. In 2000's, there were approximately 260 millions of people living in poverty. There is a laundry list of why poverty occurs in this country. To name a few, gender, education, and rural play roles in poverty. As a female, I am truly thankful for the opportunity to explore equality in United States. Unlike United States, females are considered unworth in India. Therefore, females encounter more severe discriminations and are often uneducated. Education is a major issue, because many young children work. Often they do not have the access to the school facility, so work becomes their routine. Once indians recieve education, their employment opportunity rises.  Lastly, rural has pros and cons. Rural is a place where people grow their food, but it leads to social isolation. Social isolation often brings poverty based on little education, lack of access, and much more. 

The life in Indian is very hard to fathom. Perhaps, I've been turning a blind eye to many countries that are perhaps worse off than United States. This saddened me. Now that I've learned abundantly about the poverty, so I hope to advocate for our young children in our country for a better life to prevent further destructions (ie: health, mental, physical, emotional, and cognitive).

Sharing Web Resources

We must become the change we want to see.
     —Mahatma Gandhi, Indian philosopher

Save the Children is an organization I selected to study and pursue based on its vision of changing the world starting with children. Save the Children (http://www.savethechildren.org/) first recognize adults from diverse backgrounds who are commit to accountability, innovation and collaboration to help children and families across the world. How the organization "save" the children follows with providing meals, hopes, opportunities to become literate, and ways to fight poverty and medical to fight off the diseases. Save the Children has official offices in United States, Asia, Latin America/Caribbean, Middle East/Eurasia, and Africa. The organization has specialized programs: child protection, Education and Child Development, Health and Nutrition, HIV/AIDS, and Livelihoods to supply specific supports in different circumstances.

Save the Children offers opportunities for individuals who are interested in making the differences in children and families' lives. The opportunities include: sponosor a child, volunteer, career, and through donations.

Personal Notes on Save the Children:

What drew my attention to this organization was its participation in the diversity. Currently, Save the Children is focusing on particular areas such as Libya and Egypt where turmoil is happening to provide assistances to children such as shelter, meals, sense of secure in midst of the voilence and traffickers. The issues in different areas are just about the same in our homeland with exceptions. Children in these mentioned locations are at higher risk in became victims of war and politics. It is easy to turn a blind eye to a certain circumstance that happens in our homeland in which we recognize is happening in other countries. Chilren are our future who will build and destroy the kingdoms when we grow old and pass, so it is imperative that we understand the changes and issues. Then we can guide them through the changes with proper knowledge. 

Quotes:

 " Every four seconds a child survives thanks to the basic healthcare provided by local health workers."

"one child dies every three seconds largely from preventable and treatable causes due to the lack of basic health care." (Save the Children emphasized that there is a great need for health workers.)

Establishing Professional Contacts and Expanding Resources

Establishing professional contacts and expanding resources seemed like a challenging assignment. I was not sure what I wanted to do, but I knew I always wanted to learn more about international countries. I decided to contact a member of The Global Alliance of NAEYC in Canada and a member of UNICEF in Honduras. As of now, I have not yet heard anything from either one. I'm hoping something will come along later this week.

Honestly, I have hardly ever browse international organizations that focus on early childhood education. As a part of this assignment, I came across to:

http://www.savethechildren.org/site/c.8rKLIXMGIpI4E/b.6540957/k.AD3E/HrNew_Volunteers.htm

I started to realize that there are rich information in different websites. I selected Save the Children based on the fact that it supports children in 120 countries including United States. Through this, I hope to learn much more about Early Childhood Education.