International Awareness

UNICEF states, “Every child has the right to survive and thrive,” unfortunately, many do not get that opportunity. Three areas of early international childhood that UNICEF (https://www.unicef.org/what-we-do) are Nutrition, Health, and Early Childhood Development. UNICEF understands that children develop the most during the first few years of life, I like the quote that they have by Raffi Cavoukian “When you pay attention to the beginning of the story, you can change the whole story.” UNICEF recognizes that children living internationally do not always have health care, and many children die from things that are completely preventable with proper care. They also recognize the importance of proper nutrition, which many children do not have access to or even know what proper nutrition is. My goal for this field to raise international awareness is to pay more attention to the stories and help change the path of the story to a wonderful story with a long life.

New Insight

I was exploring my website this week (https://cscce.berkeley.edu/), and I came across an article called "What's Causing the Shortage of Qualified Early Care and Education Teachers." (https://cscce.berkeley.edu/hole-in-the-bucket/) I found this interesting because I have seen how hard it can be to find early education teachers, and I was interested in learning more. The biggest reason that there is a shortage due to lack of acceptable compensation, the article stated that early child care is the lowest-paid occupation. The shortage comes from various reasons, but one of those reasons is education requirements. I believe that many people view childcare as a job to have while attending school and not as a career. Therefore many of them don't have the required education to be alone with children. This leads children to be with teachers who are not qualified, and therefore, they do not have quality learning. My new insight is that this field is one of the lowest-paying jobs; early educators need to work together to change that and raise early educators' compensation.

Web Resources

The first link I followed was titled “Valuing Women’s Caregiving During and After the Coronavirus Crisis” it took me to the Center for American Progress (https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/women/reports/2020/06/03/485855/valuing-womens-caregiving-coronavirus-crisis/ ) I searched the issues section of this site and found that they touch base on many topics. There are many issues in the world right now, and this website has a dedicated section for each of them, such as courts, criminal justice, early childhood, LGBTQ rights, poverty, race and ethnicity, women, and so much more. The website that I have been following throughout this course (https://cscce.berkeley.edu/) has a specific section for equity publications with current and some older publications regarding equity. I gained insight into the issues and trends in this field about the many resources available to everyone about these issues.

The first new insight that I found comes from supporting innovation in this field, this is one of the key ingredients: policy, funding, and professional environments that support experimentation and entrepreneurial investment in new ideas. The second idea or insight that I gained from this website was the importance of precision and how it can help target issues and what the goals of fixing those issues are. The most important thing I learned from this is that precision includes clarity. The final insight that I learned is that a community helps connect people.

Globally I looked more into Canada, I found it interesting that that just had two key mandates which are

1. supporting research in early brain and biological development, mental health, and addiction, and
2. translating that research for policymakers, healthcare communities, and the general public.

My favorite things that I learned from exploring Canada more was that they are connecting science and policies by translating it into easy to understand ways for us. One issue with all this scientific research for the early childhood field is that most preschool teachers don’t know how to read the research papers or that they have simply forgotten because they don’t read research papers every day. I like that through the Alberta Family Wellness Initiative, Canada is able to do this.

The information from this post can be found at this website (https://developingchild.harvard.edu/about/what-we-do/global-work/)