My Personal Birthing Experience

One hope I have when I think about working with children and families who come from diverse backgrounds:   My hope for working with children and families who come from diverse backgrounds is that I will use my knowledge about diversity and culturally responsive practices to serve these families in my best capacity.  I hope that I will be a role model for both my colleagues and my students in regard to incorporating culture into my instruction and classroom environment as well as how to appropriately respond to students and adults of different cultures and backgrounds.   I will also have to learn how to be open minded because what I am learning now to best serve our populations might not be best practices five years from now because our populations will be constantly changing.   One goal I would like to set for the early childhood field related to issues of diversity, equity, and social justice: I have been in the same school for the last twenty y...

Scenario for blog post:    I am working in an early childhood setting of your choice—a hospital, a child care center, a social service agency. I receive word that the child of a family who has recently emigrated from a country I know nothing about will join my group soon. I want to prepare yourself to welcome the child and her family. Luckily, I am enrolled in a course about diversity and have learned that in order to support families who have immigrated I need to know more than surface facts about their country of origin. For this blog post, I will pretend first choose a country that I know nothing about that will serve as my new family’s country of origin.    I will name at least 5 ways in which I will prepare myself to be culturally responsive I will end with a brief statement describing ways I hope these preparations will benefit both me and the new family.  The name of my country is Peru.    I choose Peru because I have heard the name...

What memory do you have of an incident when you experienced bias, prejudice, and/or oppression, or witnessed someone else as the target of bias, prejudice, and/or oppression?  When I think about an incident when I experienced bias prejudice or oppression I think about when I wasn’t encouraged to try out for the JV Boys soccer team at my high school.  When I was in high school there was no Girls JV Soccer team.  I was in my last year of Barrens Soccer league because of my age and I really didn’t want to give up playing soccer because it was my favorite sport.  I had the ability to play with the males that were my age.  I had proven it because I had been playing on an all almost boys team for Barrens league for several years.  I could play just as well or even better than the best of them.  Yet, although I had expressed a desire to continue to play no one encouraged me to go out and try out for the boys’ team. ...