Who Am I as a Communicator?

When you are communicating with someone, try to be a very effective communicator because you never know how someone is watching your communication skills and reactions.

This week in Communicating and Collaborating in the Early Childhood Field course, we were able to examine our own communication and listening styles, dispositions, and skills, as well as getting someone else to evaluate you. It was amazing to see how a family member and a colleague perceived my communication skills mostly the same as I did myself.

The insights about communications I gained this week is to never take communication for granted, and how not to make assumptions and perceptions about a person by their outer appearance. As an educator, it is very important to reach out to our children and their families we serve with effective communication skills. We need to make an effort to build a friendly network, especially  to the ones that we perceive as being "different" from us. When we exercise good communication skills, we will develop the abilities to communicate in a better constructive way.

Communication and Culture:

In an increasingly diverse economy, I come in contact with cultural diversity by interacting with colleagues in the school, my neighborhood, and my workplace. The United States is known as the melting pot nation, a place for people of different backgrounds to come together and ultimately grow together. Unfortunately, from language to food to religious practice, cultural traditions are still around us. I read in one of my daily bread books about hospitality:

Whether we inhabit a home, a college dorm, a prison cell, or a military barracks, we can welcome others as a way of showing our love for them and for Christ. Hospitality is making room for people in need. –David McCasland

When involved in a diverse community, I have a tendency to communicate differently with people from different groups and cultures other than my own. One of the most culturally unresponsiveness situations I find myself in is communicating effectively with my children and their families who speak another language; mostly in my area- Spanish. I have learned some beginner’s Spanish words, but I still can’t speak it well enough to communicate effectively. I find myself using a lot of hand gestures, using different objects to identify what I’m talking about, or if the communication is still not effective, I resort to a translator, which makes me feel terrible because I wasn’t able to supply the needs of the children and their parents.

As an early childhood professional, in order to communicate more effectively with my children and their families there are three strategies I will use. Among these are:

1. Understanding and acknowledging that we are from different cultures and backgrounds.
2. Become other-oriented by developing appropriate knowledge and understanding of the Hispanic culture and how they communicate.
3. Have a translator on standby when conducting parent conferences, special activities, or to translate newsletters, or any other important information.

* Here is a quote I would like to share by Bernard Baruch:

“We don’t all come over on the same boat, but we’re all in the same boat”

Communication Skills: Language, Nonverbal, Listening

Television Episode:

The television program I watched was an episode of “Martin” titled, “You’ve Got a Friend”. As I watched this episode on mute, I saw a variety of different nonverbal expressions and body languages that showed hand gestures, smiling, hugging, disagreement, eye contact, confusion, and hostility. The character’s relationships seemed to be an off-and-on togetherness.

After I watched the episode with the sound on, I realized the true meaning of the various expressions, and body gestures. It was exciting to see how my assumptions of their nonverbal behaviors of what were actually going on was so different from hearing the verbal communications.

I believe my assumptions would have been more correct if I had watched a show I knew well. But from watching this episode, I have learned that communication is not always straightforward. You can make the wrong assumptions based on messages communicated through body language and facial expressions.

This assignment was also great because I was able to put myself in a deaf person’s position, and see how difficult it is to read lips, and understand what a person is saying verbally.
　

Competent Communication

The person I chose that demonstrates competent communication would be my Pre-K Administrator. I chose him because when I need help or advice about something concerning my students and parents, I can go to him without being afraid or intimidated. He demonstrates effective communication skills and partnership with his employees by showing us trust and a mutual understanding that respects us professionally and as human beings. Throughout the years, we have learned that being able to communicate effectively with our parents will nurture the growth and learning of the individual child by sharing information, insights and concerns. It is a necessity and not an extra to exhibit good communication skills to our parents as well as their children.

I would definitely like to model my communication behaviors after my Administrator because our staff loves him, and we have a better working atmosphere among us.

Professional Hopes and Goals

As an early childhood educator, I hope to be an effective culturally responsive teacher when I work with children and families that come from diverse backgrounds. In order for me to be effective, I will strive to make learning more appropriate and teach the "whole" child, by taking each child's strengths and challenges into account, and plan and develop the curriculum and environment accordingly.

One goal I would like for the early childhood field related to issues of diversity, equity, and social justice would be to set the foundation in early childhood for every child to grow up in a world free from bias and discrimination, and be able to learn in an positive environment that will promote academics success in their lives.

I would like to thank Dr. Morgan and my colleagues for a successful learning journey in this course of "Perspectives on Diversity and Equity". I wish that each and everyone of you will continue to fulfill your goals in the early childhood field, and strive to promote equity, and social justice in an increasingly diverse nation.

Welcoming Families From Around the World

As an early childhood professional, we encounter children from diverse backgrounds all the time whose families come from many different countries. For this week's assignment, I were asked in what ways can I prepare myself for working in an early childhood setting when a child of a family who has emigrated from a country that I know nothing about will be joining my classroom soon. I was told to choose a country I know nothing about as this family's country of origin.

I currently live in the United States, and the country of origin I chose for the family to be from was China. First of all, for me to be culturally responsive, I need to have the ability to relate and to communicate with others who I don't share the same backgrounds, cultures, languages, and ethnicity. In order to be an effective culturally responsive teacher, I will teach the "whole child". I will have to do research and learn about the Chinese culture and find out from the family as to what they expect concerning the child's education, and how I can support them. My classroom will need to reflect the Chinese culture of the family and child. I will want to build positive bridges between the home and school experiences, and use a variety of instructional strategies that are connected to the different learning styles of both the American culture and Chinese culture.

As I done research on the early childhood education in China, I found out that much of the curriculum content there is similar to an American program, but the teaching methods are different from the "developmentally-appropriate practices' advocated by early childhood educators in the United States (NAEYC, 1986). The emphasis is upon the teacher directed, total group instruction. All children are expected to do the same thing at the same time. They are expected to proceed at the same pace. The child is responsible for keeping up and poor performance is usually attributed to "not working hard enough." Unlike the early childhood curriculum in the United States, the teaching methods and available materials limit opportunities for creative expression or pursuit of individual interests. Most importantly, in China as well as in the United States, the educators and families greatly love and value their children. They make major investments in their children and the education system.

By keeping this in mind, as an early childhood educator, I hope the child, as well as myself, will be able to learn from each other's cultures and let this learning experience be beneficial to the child, family, and other children on how to liverespectfully together in a diverse classroom setting.

References:
National Association for the Education of Young Children. (1986). Position statement on developmentally appropriate practive in early childhood programs serving children from birth to age eight. Young Children, 41(6), 3-19.

Vaughan, JoAn. (1993). Early childhood education in China. Association for childhood educational international. Retrieved from http://www.pbs.org/kcts/preciouschildren/earlyed/read_vaughan.html.

The Personal Side of Bias, Prejudice, and Oppression

One memory of an incident when I experienced bias was when I applied for an Administrative Coordinator position online. I believe the hiring of this position was bias because I wasn't contacted for an interview. All I received was  an email stating:

 To whom It May Concern:
 Your application for the Administrative Coordinator, is greatly appreciated. Your qualifications, along with those of other applicants, were very competitive. However, the search has concluded and the hiring department has selected a candidate whose qualifications appear to meet its current needs...

This incident diminish equity in that there wasn't any interviews conducted, and the email was sent out unprofessionally. I felt like this was unfair and unjust treatment in selecting the candidate for the position, and that the person hired was already employed in that business. From experience, I know that in the school system I work, they have to post the available position, but many times someone in the system has already been hired for that position prior to the posting.

In order for this incident to be turned into an opportunity for greater equity, I think every candidate should be given an opportunity for an interview, in order to get to know the candidate personally and professionally, instead of drawing conclusions from an online application.