It is hard to believe that this journey that I set out on almost two years ago has finally come to an end. I started this journey with a four-month old little girl and added a little boy half way through! There were so many times that I felt I would not make it through a course due to my hectic everyday life. I learned so much from this program not only academically and professionally but also personally.
One thing that I learned is that I need to be confident in my abilities as I doubted myself all the way to the end of the program, this last course actually the most, but I always ended up doing well. Transferring this to my professional life will help me to instill confidence in the young children that I work with and to teach them perseverance.
This program taught me that I need to do more. Getting by with just doing the minimum for the children and families that we serve is not acceptable and educators always need to do more. I found myself thinking this during almost every class in this program in many different aspects. I need to be an advocate for the children and families that I am working with.
I learned that there is so much more to diversity than I ever imagined. I now understand the different types of diversity and am able to recognize bias when I see it. It takes more for me to point it out to others but that is something that I am still working towards. It is hard to stand up to others, but I know that we must in order to make things right for young children and their families.
When thinking of the future I will continue on my path of being an anti-bias educator, always learning about this approach and the early childhood field. If given the opportunity, I would like to work with parents even more to give them resources and support in their lives as well. This may take time to get a position where I am the one working in a partnership with families but it is something that I would like to do in the future.
To my colleagues and instructors, I must say thank you. Thank you for taking the time to read my thoughts and always giving me feedback that will help me professionally. While I am looking forward to having free time again I will miss the opportunity to collaborate with all of you, my colleagues, that live all over the country and work in many different areas in early childhood. Each of you has brought a unique perspective to our program and my eyes have been opened multiple times as I hope that I have brought insight to you. Thank you and good luck in molding the minds of young children.
Robin,
ReplyDeleteI agree with your sentiments as well. This program has taught me that I need to do more for both the children and their families. When children do not have the support that they need to have a successful education, we are always so quick to judge the parents and their lives instead of being a teacher and investigating to see what is the root problem and how we can fix this. This is why we have so many low-level learners in schools. We are to busy judging parents instead of helping them understand the importance of being apart of their child's education.