When I Think of Child Development...

-
We exist in community, and though we are only one person, we can be that one that makes a positive difference in a child's life. There will be many people in and out a a child's life. Some will help the child develop, others will hinder. I want to leave the right mark.
I feel like this sums up the goal of child development for me. As caregivers we help the child progress from focused on themselves to seeing others, and hopefully then preparing them for responsible citizens as they learn to care about others across the world.
Related image


Each child is unique. Its my job to connect and help each student I work with succeed in their own way.

Comments

  1. UnknownMarch 3, 2018 at 8:31 PM

    Jessica-

    Thank you for your thoughtful and educated contributions to our early childhood development course. You challenged me to look at topics from another perspective and re-examine my own biases and thought processes. Best of luck in your future learning and activism.

    Bri Wolfe

    ReplyDelete
  2. UnknownMarch 3, 2018 at 10:45 PM

    Beautiful thoughts and thoughts. Thank you for sharing with us!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What I Have Learned

-
Image
Working with children from different backgrounds requires us to take a flexible approach to teaching. What I have planned for the day may not connect to the students in a way that is helpful because if a cultural disconnect, difference in vocabulary or background knowledge, or because it brings up a microaggression I was not aware of. That’s why planning with inclusion in mind is essential, but so also is the flexibility to modify a lesson when that disconnect or oppression is witnessed. A goal I have moving forward from this course is to be more intentional in my planning and implementation throughout the school year to not just focus on teaching students reading, writing, and math, but also broaden their ideas about the world in a meaningful way that is relevant to their lives. When we as teachers intertwine the academics with social justice and inclusion, we can make time for empowering advocacy.             My hope, then, is to be effective in sending students to third grade a
Read more

Start Seeing Diversity: Creating Art

-
This is a poem I put together to represent my learning and growth through the Start Seeing Diversity videos (Laureate Education, 2011) and the topics explored in the blog assignments. It is meant to chronicle the transitions from biased thinking through my realization of areas I could improve. My aim was to focus on the awakened realization of bias and how to move from a place of naivete toward creating a more inclusive approach to teaching. Reference: Laureate Education (Producer). (2011). Start seeing diversity. [Video file]. Retrieved from https://class.waldenu.edu It’s Not About Me It’s not about me, I live in the home of the brave In the land of the free, I never owned a slave, Look all the way back in my family tree It’s not about me, I’m just a teacher, I help kids to count one, two, three. How could I be an intolerant child of a preacher? I’m not even a person of color so you can plainly see. Its not about me, When I see an “other” I practi
Read more

Gender, Gender Identity, and Sexual Orientation

-
Image
Homophobia and heterosexism are unfortunately permeating the world of childrens toys, media, and literature in ways we must be more aware of. In looking for positive and negative examples of sexual orientation in childrens literature and media, what I discovered was that it was difficult to find any mainstream items portraying homosexual parents in any normalizing way. Even as much forward progress toward acceptance we've made as a society, when it comes to children, we are still modeling almost exclusively hetero examples for them. This part of many children's social identity, as a child of two moms or two dads, is nearly invisible commercially. What is present in terms of modeling are examples such as these:   Barbie can be bought separately, but the messaging is clear here, she is supposed to marry Ken. This is what both the dolls and the Barbie cartoon consistently adhere to in the storyline and marketing. Even in trolls, an otherwise positive motivational movie, bo
Read more