Establishing Professional Contacts and Expanding Resources

            I loved the fact that I was able to contact several professionals to expand my resources on how I can support all learners in the classroom. For this particular assignment, I contacted three early childhood educators with the help of my friends and my recent travels. In August I went on my honeymoon to the lovely island of St. Lucia, while there I was able to take a tour of the city and learn so much about the culture but what shocked me is that all citizens must pay for their children to attend school. Since many individuals live in poverty they are unable to afford an education for their child and the child is then put to work. In the United States, all children have the ability to attend school because of the taxpayers. While early education is a privilege and many families do pay for their child to attend, kindergarten to high school is typically free if they use the public school system. I also have reached out to an educator in Ghana and in Peru, this is because I have two friends who are currently in the Peace Corps who are living in these countries. While I sent emails to all three I have only heard back from the educator in St. Lucia, I am hoping by the weekend I will have a better connection with all of whom I reached out to.

            After reviewing the many links for the second part of this assignment I decided to subscribe to the National Association of Child Care Resource & Referral Agencies due to the fact they have many articles that support military families. I come from a military family, my father served, my grandfather, 4 of my uncles and my brother is currently serving. I never had the opportunity to see how our government supports active duty family members and veterans and thought this is a great opportunity to broaden my education through Child Care Aware of America.

The second website that I chose is Society for Research in Child Development, as stated in a newsletter, “This information will be communicated in an accessible manner to a wider audience so that policy, practice and education decisions will benefit from state-of-the-art scientific information and the public will be better informed on findings from developmental research. Complementary efforts will be made to increase exchanges between researchers and practitioners that can generate improved research by incorporating applied knowledge and questions” (SRCD Governing Council, 2005). By having leading members in the early education field, I can obtain a lot of information throughout these newsletters that will support my professionalism in the early education field.  

I look forward to viewing newsletters on a weekly basis and also expanding a professional circle with other early childcare providers from around the world.

Reference

Navy. (n.d.). Retrieved from

http://usa.childcareaware.org/fee-assistancerespite/military-families/navy/

SRCD Governing Council. (2005, April 6). The Society for Research on Child

Development Strategic Plan. Retrieved from http://www.srcd.org/sites/default/files/strategicplan.pdf