Fluent Essays

Week 1 - Journal In the course text, Fifty Strategies for Communicating and Working with Diverse Families, the end of each chapter includes a section titled “What Teachers Can Do.” The journal activities throughout this course will allow you to reflect upon and note strategies for family-centered care and education. From this week’s reading (Sections 1 and 2), identify your favorite technique that you can use to welcome and partner with families in the childcare or academic setting. Describe how you will utilize the technique in the childcare or classroom setting and how you feel the technique will encourage positive relationship with families. Carefully review the Grading Rubric (Links to an external site.) for the criteria that will be used to evaluate your journal entry. _and_2.docx Unformatted Attachment Preview Sections 1 WHAT TEACHERS CAN DO • • • • • • • • • • • • Recognize that a goal for quality education and care programs is for all children to feel good about themselves. One way for teachers to support that goal is to accept a child’s family even though the teacher may not approve of that family. It is imperative that children not receive negative messages about their families! • Family-centered programs provide the best education and support for children. To be familycentered, early childhood professionals partner with all families, including LGBT families. • Create an environment of safety and trust. Confidentiality is an important part of such an environment. • Create a welcoming environment that invites relationship building among all families and between families and teachers or staff. • Unlearn any biases you have around sexual orientation and gender identity. Oppression is oppression, and you don’t want to have any part of it—either by supporting oppressive systems, practicing discrimination yourself, or harboring internal oppression. • Learn the appropriate language related to LGBT families. Don’t assume you know what anyone wants to be called; find out. The glossary in Lesser, Burt, and Gelnaw (2005, pp. 9–14) is almost sure to teach you something you didn’t know. • Recognize that LGBT parents have struggles that most other parents don’t, such as asserting their right to exist as a family or keeping their family secret for the safety of their children. They also face a different set of legal issues around marriage, employment benefits, adoption, divorce, and child custody. • Recognize that taking on challenges makes you stronger. Struggling with your own beliefs and honoring all families at the same time may seem overwhelming. If the struggle isn’t within you, you may find it among colleagues, between them and families, or among the families themselves. It may be hard to facilitate relationships with these struggles going on, but you have to do your best. • A simple strategy for respecting all families is to check out your forms. Do they have spaces for “mother’s name” and “father’s name,” or do they simply indicate “parents’ names”? • Watch out for events like Mother’s Day and Father’s Day when not all children have connections with a mother or father. This issue doesn’t just apply to LGBT families. Many children live in single-parent families with no connection to the other parent. How about skipping Mother’s Day and Father’s Day, and just celebrating Parents’ Day? • Address the family’s strengths, not their weaknesses. Like all families, LGBT families have their unique strengths. In addition, they may have some strengths that are directly related to the challenges they face, such as the ability to express who they really are, a willingness to take risks and move toward new forms and social structures, a deep desire and commitment to being a parent, resilience, and the ability to stand up to discrimination. Sections 2 WHAT TEACHERS CAN DO • • Create a sense of belonging from the beginning by finding out what everybody with whom you come in contact wants to be called. Then, work on learning all the names—including the correct • • • • • • • • • • • • • pronunciation. This is not an easy job if the program or class is large, but it is a good way for early childhood professionals to work on their own learning skills as models for the children. • Introduce everyone who is part of the program or a support to the classroom, such as aides, cooks, custodians, and bus drivers. • Help people get acquainted by putting up a picture board of the staff, with a little something written about each person. It could be a short biography, or a statement of what the person likes about working with children and families, or a list of hobbies. Put this where families that drop off their children can easily see it. Some programs include substitutes on the picture board as well as regular employees. • Consider a picture board of families as well, with a few facts or statements about each one. Put this up where staff and other families can see it. • If the entry area has the space, consider not just a bulletin board planned and maintained by the staff, but also a bulletin board for parents that they plan, maintain, and interact with. An interactive idea to put on the family bulletin board is a changing survey, with space for family members to write under a question. For example, a question could be “What is your child’s favorite restaurant?” This kind of question gives parents something to talk to each other about. • In a preschool setting, if children arrive with a family member each day, have the room set up for a free play period, and make yourself available to greet children and adults. When children enter an interesting environment, they can separate more easily and also become engaged with the materials and with each other. That gives adults a chance to talk to each other briefly, both at the beginning of the session and at the end. • Introduce families to each other. Note where personal connections are forming, and later on, suggest that maybe the family consider changing the emergency form to include new friends, rather than the distant aunt in another town whom the child barely knows, to come get the child when necessary. • Help parents become resources for each other. Carpooling is one way they can work together and gain a sense of belonging to a community. • Use the intake interview, if there is one, to begin getting acquainted, including finding out what special interests or skills family members have. • Make sure your environment is welcoming to everybody. Check to see that it reflects an antibias point of view—one that includes everybody in the classroom and community beyond. A welcoming environment means that images on the walls include everybody, the languages of the families are represented, and adaptations are made for people with disabilities—both children and adults. One program wanted to make sure that all the books they had available for the children gave welcoming messages, so they taped a clean sheet of paper to the inside cover of each book with the suggestion for parents to write their comments and reactions to the book. It soon became clear that what one parent loved, another felt offended by. In this way, both parents and staff learned about differing perspectives about what feels welcoming. • Having an address list is a good idea so that families can connect with each other on their own. Be sure you have permission from each family to put their name and contact information on the list. • Fund-raising is a way for family members to get to know each other by working together. Be careful to recognize that some families have children in more than one class or program. Fundraising can get to be a burden in a large family. • Always think of meetings as a way for people to get to know each other, no matter what the purpose of the meeting is. Start with an icebreaker to loosen people up and get them relaxed and interacting. • This entire book is full of ideas about how to make families and staff into a community. In particular, look at Strategy 28 for ideas about how to set up the environment for communication, Strategy 22 for ideas about how to get families to participate in the program, and Strategy 6 for ideas about how to build partnerships with families. ... Purchase answer to see full attachment