Week 8- Professional hopes and goals

I hope that I will continue to reach out to all my students and families.  I am moving at the end of this school year (from the job that I love) to relocate to be closer to friends and family.  I will be moving to a urban city (Seattle) and I plan on working in the thick of everything.  This will be different from my more rural community that I am working in now.   I know that I will be working with a more diverse population and I hope that everything that I learned throughout this course I will take with me and use with all my future students and families.

My goal from early childhood is that everyone who is in the field continues to advocate for the profession.  Continued progress in advocating for all students and families will help make programs more equitable across the nation. 

I would just like to say how thankful for everyone in our program.  I feel fortunate that everyone brings such insightful posts each week.  I am happy to be apart of our early childhood culture and it is fantastic to watch everyone grow!

Week 8

I am pretending that I am in my current position as a special educaiton teacher and my new student and family are from Bulgaria (more specifically from the Roma population). I talked with my brother because he is a Peace Corps volunteer in a very small village in Bulgaria. 

For me to be culturally responsive I would need to consider the following information:
1) Children often do not have any concept of color or numbers or have any writing skills.  The first time they are introduced to these concepts are in kindergarten, which in Bulgaria is a year later than in the United States.
2) Roma people have their own language and different dialects depending on the region they are from.  
3) Currently, there has been an several missionaries in Bulgaria that have been Seventh Day Advent.  My brother noted that often the Roma population will follow the prevailing religion and look at is as protection to follow that belief. 
4) In a school setting (meetings, conferences, family nights) include all members of the family.  Often the grandmothers (Baba's) are the caretakers of the grandchildren and they are highly regarded. 
5) Kid's are not regarded as high importance (as there typically many children in the family).  Roma populations are very male dominated and an example of this being that when food is served fathers eat first and then he decides when others (wife and kids) can eat.  Most of the time it may just be the scraps. This would be very important to be aware about as a person from the outside it could be considered neglect. 

 I would hope that taking these considerations in before my student arrived would help me be more culturally responsive.  I would be able to prepare for a student who might not have been taught academic certain skills yet.  I would be able to know that this would be a cultural thing and not a disability.  I would know that they whole family should be included in the meeting and events.  I would also know to do a little bit of research to know where the family came from specifically in Bulgaria, so that I could hopefully learn a few words (although I may not be able to if it is a dialect not recorded). 
 

Week 6-The Personal Side of Bias, Prejudice, and Oppression

When I was getting my BA I was part of a program called Camp Adventure and we were highly trained camp counselors that worked on military bases around the world.  My first summer I was in Landstuhl, Germany working at a teen center.  At once point during the summer a young boy got into a fight with another.  He was hit in the face with a ping pong ball and wanted to get after the boy who accidentally hit him.  I immediately asked him to turn around and go for a walk and then he hit me.  Our protocol was to call a meeting with his parents.  I thought that it would be a meeting to discuss strategies to deescalate discuses where we would go from here.  Well, it turned out that his mother walked into the meeting and called me a " rich, white, racist.” Equity was diminished as soon as she walked in the door, she had assumed that I played apart in the reason her son hit me, even though he was mad at the other boy and not me. I had no words that could come out and it was the first time I had felt that my skin color was defining who I am and why something had happened. I felt that there was a bias towards me before she even knew me.  

This particular young boy was not the easiest boy in the center and at times it was challenging to deal with the behavior he was exhibiting.  Even though this was the most in your face incident I had ever experienced, it turned out to be a wonderful experience.  I changed the way I worked with this teen.  I saw the way his mother acted with me and I had a feeling she might act this way with her son.  I started to act in a more caring way towards him and we worked out what had happened and ended the summer on a great note.