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.