Professional Hopes and Goals

One hope that I have for working with diverse families and backgrounds is that  I will continue to advocate for diverse families to gain the resources and support that they need.

One goal I would like to set for the early childhood field is that there be continued professional development in regards to diversity. The teacher education preparation programs at a collegial level recognize this need, but the field outside of college needs to continue to see the need for professional development for the already hired staff.

Thank you to my peers within this course for the positive feedback in our discussions and blogs. Sometimes it is nice (and needed) to hear positive things from other professionals.

Welcoming Families from Around the World

I actually do not have to make up a family for this exercise. I am currently experiencing a family for a “new” country. Last June (2014) I was made aware that starting in July I would be having a little girl from Haiti in my class. The only thing I really knew about Haiti was that it is a tropical island and there was a hurricane there are few years back. I could picture in my head what a “typical” Haitian looked like as well. At the initial meeting with the family I asked about their native language. I learned that this family spoke Haitian Creole. My first thought was “oh no, how am I going to communicate with this family.” There was a family friend along at the meeting that spoke English and he said that he would be my “contact” person (after a month his phone was out of service and I never heard back from him). After the initial meeting I did some research on Haitian Creole, just to see what more familiar language was closest to it and that is French. I was thinking if worse comes to worse, I can always try to write a note home in French (thank you google translator!)

 Once the little girl started in my classroom, in July, I realized she was speaking some Haitian Creole, so I looked up simple phrases like "hello", "goodbye," and "thank you", just so the little girl would not feel completely out of place. I also started the search for a Haitian Creole interpreter in the event one was needed (as previously mentioned that took forever to get approval for). Since I was not immediately successful with obtaining an interpreter I had to think outside the box. I had a friend in high school that moved to Haiti with his family for a few years and I got in contact with him to see if his parents would be willing to help me if needed. I learned that they are no longer living in the area, so that resource was not going to work.

I was pretty much stuck at this point (September) and very frustrated because I knew nothing about this little girl or her family, and not because I didn’t want to learn about them. This feeling went on for months and in December things finally started to click. For the last few months I have learned so much about this girl and her family and their "story." This little girl was just diagnosed with Autism through my preschool program and the social worker for our program and I (and the interpreter) are going to be sitting down with mom in two weeks to talk about what is next for this family. It is very apparent through our conversations that she needs help with this little girl and in life. It is my goal to get this family as much help as they need and provide them with resources so that when this child goes to kindergarten in the fall everything will be set up as best as possible.

The Personal Side of Bias, Prejudice and Opression

Thinking over this blog assignment, I realized that I had blocked out a bias/prejudice situation that I dealt with all of last year. I honestly have not thought of this situation before this week.

My teacher assistant from last year was new to education. She had never worked in the field prior to being hired as my preschool teacher assistant. She started with me in August and I quickly learned about her beliefs. Her beliefs did not match mine, but I was hoping that would not matter or affect our working relationship. By September, I knew that it was going to be a long year. My assistant was starting to make comments about the children we work with and those comments were offensive. She blamed parents for a child’s disability. She frequently made her opinions known about government assistance, and many of my families receive government assistance. She also frequently remarked about some of my families needing to learn English. I am not going to go into all the details of her comments, but I think you can get a good picture of what she was like.

I had meetings with her going over protocol of our place of employment as well as my views and beliefs about the students and families in this classroom. She did not agree with anything I said and made that very clear. I started to document her behaviors and what she said, because she was no longer keeping her thoughts and opinions to herself in my classroom, she was taking them out to the whole school. I was getting very concerned about this. By December, I realized I could not be the change agent I was hoping I could be, so I went to my supervisors. Unfortunately they were not very helpful. From December to the end of the year they did not step foot in my classroom to discuss my concerns or even make my assistant aware of my concerns.

I was so offended by her comments and beliefs not only personally but professionally. Our classroom was in an urban setting and I think we had three “white” students. This was clearly not the classroom for her. I just hoped she was smart enough not to make any comments in front of parents, which she was.

The one good thing is that she was moved to a rural school for this school year. I do hear that she is still up to her old tricks, but I am happy she is no longer in my classroom voicing her opinions.