Establishing Professional Contacts and Expanding Resources

Part 1:

Jon Swain, along with a few other University professionals in the UK conducted a research study on the benefits of family literacy programs and wrote and article in the February 2014 publication of the Journal of Early Childhood Research.  I sent an email to Jon Swain, professor at the University of London with the National Research and Development Centre for adult literacy and numeracy.  I wanted to connect with others to share success stories and discuss challenges that they have had in involving parents in the education of young children.

 

Additionally, I send an email to Fraces Hoyte, Faculty of Human Sciences, Institute of Early Childhood, Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW 210, Australia.  She wrote an article on the language of friendship in preschoolers.  I was interested to learn more about her work with young children and the issues and trends they are faced with in Austria. 

 

Next I contacted Satu Jarvenkallas, National President for Finland as part of the World Organization for Early Childhood Education.  My hopes in connecting with an early childhood professional from Finland is to learn more about their early childhood education structure.  In a class I took earlier in my educational studies, I learned how successful the schools are in Finland, one of the leading schools in the country.  In Finland, children do not even start school until they are about 7 years of age, and then finish school much earlier, moving on to technical schools and higher educational facilities to prepare for job training skills.  How is it that they are so far ahead of America?  I attribute this to something they must be doing right in the field of early childhood.  If we could capture that success and bring it here to America, would we stand behind President Obama who speaks out that all children should be attending a quality preschool program?  Do all children really need preschool?  My hope is to learn more about their educational success and see what I can implement in my programs here.

 

Through researching different national organizations, I found that there were many organizations in the united states that I wasn't even aware of.  While contacting people from these organizations was not part of the assignment, I found that there are many more ways that i can be involved and stay informed in early childhood trends even in my own backyard!  

 

Part 2

There are several organizations that I am already a part of and that I watch on a regular basis.  These are NAEYC and my local branch UAEYC, zerotothree.org, naccrra.org, as well as local organization to Utah such as Utah Association of Childcare Resource and Referral Association, Utah Afterschool Network, and Utah Private Childcare Association.   There are a few websites that I found myself lost in.  The first was  http://futureofchildren.org/  I read many of their past articles and watched the Youtube clip about what they do.  I subscribed to their enewsletters as well as downloaded many of their past articles and felt their information stayed up to date with good evidence based research.  I also subscribed to NIEER and Pre-K Now PEW as I felt they helped to stay up to date on many current trends and issues in the field as well as helped to answer questions that I have heard regarding universal Pre-K, as this is still an issue I am debating myself.   There are several others I decided to follow, but these two are the one I will probably spend the most time in this class focusing on.  

 

I was excited to learn additional resources where I can turn to learn more about the issues presented at this time in the field of early childhood.