Practicing Awareness of Microaggressions

       It has been known that people don’t always ‘speak their minds’, and it is suspected that people don’t always ‘know their minds’.   Hence, people’s unconscious verbal behaviors—microaggressions, can cause feelings of marginalization, inferiority, and/or unsetting emotions in others even though no offense is intended.

       I vividly remembered an incident happened to me when I was in the States, doing my undergraduate study.  One faculty member approached me, wanting to know about me.  I told him that it was fine to address me as Wong.  Trying to be humor, he smiled and said, “Wrong?  Mr. Wrong?”  “No,” I replied.  “I am Wong”, I affirmed.  “Oh!  I see, you are Wong”, he said with a grin.   I smiley replied, “Yes”, but at the bottom of my heart I did not feel good.  I felt I was teased and insulted.  Since then, I tried to avoid him, not wanting to be around him.  I believe this could be an example of a microaggression. 

       After learning about microaggressions, I shared with my colleagues this notion of verbal behaviors.  They agreed that microaggressions do happen everyday and everywhere.  I told them it is imperative to aware of and detect examples of microaggression.  By doing so, we learn to be more sensitive towards our verbal behaviors, preventing us to discriminate and stereotype others.  Besides, under our caring and protection, we should stop others to cause young children to be the target of microaggressions.   

Perspectives on Diversity and Culture

       As I asked my three colleagues (two of them are local, the other one is a foreigner) about the definitions of culture and diversity, here are the answers they gave me.   One local colleague said that culture is about one’s knowledge, experiences, and his/her backgrounds.  Diversity is the product of different cultures in a society.  Another colleague who comes from England said that culture is related to which country one is in.  There are cultural differences between one country and another, in terms of religions, foods, upbringings, behaviors, and others.  Diversity, according to his definition, is the differences within one country, one society, or one family.  For example, one family might has differences among the members in the selection of music, the tastes of food, and the colors used in drawings.  The other local colleague explained that culture is something one inherited from his/her past generation.  It could be the knowledge, the habits, and the religion.  Diversity is the differences of cultures among people  have inherited. 

       It seems that all my three colleagues believe that culture is related to how people live and relate with others.  And they (my colleagues) have the same thinking that diversity is the differences of culture among people.  However, they have omitted the aspect of dominant culture, as well as the distinguished aspects of surface and deep culture.  My colleagues look at the culture in a very general term, neglecting the impact of culture to diversity, and how individual diversity can be linked to our social identities. 

       The definitions of culture and diversity given by other people have made me realized that culture indeed is complex and dynamics, not easily be described or understood.  If one does not really study about the issues and aspects of culture and diversity, one might not fully understand the impacts and influences of culture and diversity can bring about to our society, and to individuals.  

My Family Culture

       Three things I value and would represent my family culture:  my family album, my childhood toy, and my childhood storybook.

       My family album contains my childhood photos, plus photos of my daughter, parents and siblings.  These photos captured many moments of my family’s emotions, happiness, and things that we valued.  They expressed our likes and dislikes, points of views, attitudes towards life events.  My childhood toy—a cloth puppet, represents things that my family used to provide for my siblings and me to play in our childhood.  Last but not least is a copy of my childhood storybook that my parents selected for me.  This storybook has many moral values that my parents upheld and wanted me to keep.

        Living permanently in a foreign country, which has a culture that is different from my own, would be very challenging physically and emotionally.  Hence, I would be sad and feel some lost of identity and connectedness if I could only keep one item and have to give up the other items when living in the country. 

        Each country, each society, each family, and each of us has a culture that is diverse from others.  The diverse cultures that we interact daily influence our personal life, our values and behaviors towards others.  These cultures give us a sense of identity and connectedness, impacting and supporting us socially and emotionally.

When I Think of Research...

Studying this course has made me to aware that research is a crucial tool to uncover new knowledge and understandings.  Besides, I have learned that well-designed research based on reliable and valid data can generate meaningful, conclusive findings.

Nevertheless, when doing research, we should not be too ambitious to make a major impact in our findings.  As researchers, we need to be content with making small but meaningful contributions to the ongoing quest for understanding and explanation.

When in planning and even executing stage of early childhood research, ethics issues need to be addressed to uphold the right of participants, young children in particular.  Quality early childhood research should be ethical, transparent, and sensitive, not bring any harms to the participants in the research.

One big challenge in my early childhood research is that it contains general concepts that need to be reduced to measurable elements, self-regulation in particular.  Through reductionism, however, I can convert the concepts of self-regulation and well-regulated behaviors into some definitions that can be measured easily.  For instance, I could not measure how self-regulation a child is, but I could measure how a child behaves in queuing, taking turn to talk, etc.  Hence, reductionism can make my study to have clear definitions of the terminology that are easily measured.

Last but not least, this course has taught us that every early childhood professional should become critical consumer of research. My perception of an early childhood professional is that he/she should be able to detect quality research among the pseudo research, with a mindset and right tools.

As coming to the end of this course study, I would like to take this opportunity to thank my Instructor and  colleagues for their support and advise given me throughout this course.  Many thanks!  

Research Around The World

Surfing the European Early Childhood Education Research Association (EECERA) is fascinating eye-opener to me.  I am amazed that there is such a professional association in early childhood education research in Europe.  Besides, its research journal has many articles are free for review and download. 

By exploring the back issues of the research journal, one can find many interesting topics being researched.  Currently, topics such as make-believe play, attachment, children in research, outdoor environments, etc. are seemed to be mostly studied internationally.

 

A couple of insights gained from surfing this prestigious early childhood website.  I feel proud to know that there are many professionals out in the world are actively engaging themselves to explore new paradigms, methodologies, concepts and applications in this ever-changing context of early childhood studies.  These research studies, I believe, will contribute much to improving our effectiveness in our early childhood programs and practices.  Being an emerging early childhood professional, I should come to this website from time to time to create interconnections with these professionals who have provided supports and motivations to the field.

One noteworthy information on this website I have discovered is that EECERA encourages and supports cross-national collaborations through its Special Interest Groups (SIGs).  SIG is a network of a group of researchers from different institutions, disciplines and countries who wish to collaborate around a particular theme or issue in early childhood education and care.  I wish in the near future that I could able to join in one of the SIGs for my professional growth and development.

Research that Benefits Children and Families— Uplifting Stories

I would like to share with you an interesting research article, written by Thompson (2008).  It has deepened and broadened my understanding about social and emotional development of young children.  By reading this research, I came to understand that far from egocentric, infants and toddlers advance significantly in their understanding of others’ feelings, desires, goals, intentions, and preferences during the first 2 years of life and, in so doing, establish the foundation for later social and emotional understanding.

An interesting experiment (as quoted below) reported by this article substantiate this early psychological understanding that turns upside down earlier beliefs about the developing young mind, especially the egocentric concept by Jean Piaget.   

        “An 18-month-old toddler sits at a table with a friendly experimenter.  Before them are two bowls of food:  One containing broccoli, the other Goldfish crackers.  As the toddler watches, the experimenter samples each food and, to the child surprise, the adult obviously dislikes the Goldfish crackers (frowning and saying “Ewww!”) and likes broccoli (smiling and saying “Mmmm!”) --- contrary to the preferences of nearly all young children.  The next thing that happens is equally surprising.  The experimenter reaches her hand to the child between the two bowls and says, “ I want some more.  Can you give me more?”  Toddlers overwhelmingly respond by giving the experimenter the food she prefers—the broccoli— even though it is the food that toddlers themselves dislike”.

I hope that this sharing will help you to gain some insights and enhance understanding about psychosocial development in young children.  

Reference:
Thompson, R.A. (2008, May). The Psychologist in the Baby. Journal of Zero To Three (28)5, 5-12.

My Personal Research Journey

           I chose the topic of developing young children’s self-regulation as my focus for the research simulation.  This topic interests me the most personally and, I believe, it will be of interest and significance to others.  The reason I have a great interest in this topic is because I am convinced that children need strong self-regulation skills to improve learning and behavior.  My daughter is an example for that.  Even though she is only about one and half years old, I know that she needs help to control her emotions and behaviors and develop this foundation skills of self-regulation.  If not, I am afraid that I would have problems in educating her in later life when she grows up.

            To be frank, it is not an easy job for me to do this research simulation, even to conduct the research chart.  It is totally a new skill to develop and learn.  I had taken longer time than expected to do this week assignments.  I found that I have to do a lot of readings and studies on the topic of interest in order to develop competency to do this research simulation.  So, if any of you have any good advice or insight in doing this research simulation, by all means, share it with me.  I will be very thankful for your help and support.