week 7 - welcoming families from around the world

The country I have picked is Malta. It is one of the smallest countries in the world. I never heard of the name of this country before.

Five ways I will prepare myself:

1)   Research from the internet about this country. I will have to study the culture, racial, geographical environment, social, economical environment about this place. Dig out information as much as I can.

2)   Prepare a ppt presentation about this country and people with a lot of pictures so that I can present to the children in the class. I have to prepare our other students to welcome this new student.

3)   Print a flag of this country to be included in our class nationality portfolios.

4)   Print some scenic places and people of the country and make it a poster to tip on the display wall in the classroom

5)   Try to buy some representative toys from the country online.

Understanding the culture  and background of Melta is very important so that I know how to communicate with the new student.  By preparing myself and the other students in the class will help the new student to feel being welcomed and will make his/her adjustment easier.

week 8 - Thankyou very much for all of you!

One hope:  I hope I can devote myself to charitable works to teach the poor children in the remote mountainous areas. They are usually the minority ethnics groups in China. Their culture, customs, traditions and etc are so different from all the others. It will be interesting to learn from them.

One Goal: Equity in China is not easy to achieve given the economic growth and societal developments.  However, equity is the key philosophy and principle for Communism. I would like to do some researches about these and understand  the changes of equity concept in China in relation to early childhood education.

I would like to give my deepest thanks to Dr Rosalie Parrish for her dedication and insights in providing the feedbacks to us. Also thank her for the understanding of our challenges to meet the schedule. I like her view point not to put too much emphasis on the APA formality, instead the content and our personal views and experiences in our assignments are much more important. Thankyou to all my colleagues in providing valuable and insightful feedback and comments. It is a valuable learning experience to me. I enjoy very much the course and get a lot out of it. Thankyou.

week 6- personal side of Bias, Prejudice and Oppression

I was in a hospital taking my daughter to see the doctor. It is a hospital in Beijing that serves the “expats” community. Most of the doctors, there are foreign doctors. This will also mean the medical fees you have to pay are higher than other regular local hospitals.  As foreign doctors have to get a local Chinese license in order to practice in the hospitals in Beijing, it is not easy to this hospital to get foreign doctors in certain expert areas.  There was a white woman coming to the receptionist to ask for an appointment with the doctor.  The receptionist gave her a couple of Chinese.  But the lady specifically said she did not want a Chinese doctor even he might be able to speak perfect English.  Such statement or request for it is beyond racial discrimination. It embedded the message of micro-invalidation that she did not trust Chinese doctor would have the capability equivalent to the foreign doctor counterpart. Prejudice is “an attitude, opinion, or feeling formed without adequate prior knowledge, thought, or reason” (Derman-Sparks & Edwards, 2010) It was an obvious prejudice as she even did not know the background or capability of the Chinese doctors.

The incident above diminished equity. Equity is defined as “treatment that is fair and just, taking into account the capacities of individuals, while not discriminating because of racial identity, ethnicity, gender, religion, ability, or any other aspect of their identity”.  Firstly the lady was biased with racial identity. She explicitly ruled out Chinese doctors. Secondly she also ruled out the ability of Chinese doctors in general meaning she did not have the confidence in Chinese doctors being able to help her medical problems.  Thirdly she probably worried about language problems of the Chinese physician.

I felt sorry for the Chinese doctors working in this hospital. I was told that the salary for Chinese doctors and foreign doctors was also different. The Chinese doctors were being paid on local terms while the foreign doctors were on expats terms with a lot of various allowances and subsidies.  Such differences were not based on the background or experiences or credentials of the doctors but based on their nationalities or where they come from.  Are Chinese doctors capabilities worse than the foreign doctors?  Statistics has shown that Chinese doctors working in local hospitals have more experiences than their foreign doctors working in other countries in the same number of years as the quantity of patients that Chinese doctors have to see per day in China is a lot more than those in foreign countries given the population size in China.

To improve the situation, the hospital should make promotion about the background and experiences of the Chinese doctors so that patients will know there might be no differences between the two types of physicians.  Of course, the pay scale of both doctors should be the same so that the hospital can attract the best Chinese doctors to work for them. Thirdly the hospital should provide support to Chinese doctors in terms of language translation so that Chinese doctors can communicate well with a foreign patient.

References:

Derman-Sparks L. & Edwards J.O. (2010). Anti-Bias Education for young children or ourselves Key Terms (ppxi-xiii), NAEYC.

week 4 - microagressions

This is an example of microaggression of myself.  It is the end of the financial year, and our Finance colleague should prepare the year-end financial summary for management to review. As the finance manager is sick, I have to instruct the accountant to make the statements, etc.  Our accountant has been with the company for more than five years. She is a causal person always wearing jeans and T-shirt.  I always feel she is young and looks like a student.  I have seldom contacted the accountant directly for works in the past. She is  quite senior in the company finance department.  So I sent her an email listing all the required documents and statements I need. Also, I list her details of all the process and data where she should be able to find, etc. in very significant details. I also send her the sample of the reports that I need and the government may need for review.  Then she wrote me back an email politely acknowledged the receipt of my email and information. Then she also told me that she was the one doing all these works during the last five years. With a second thought, I think I am committing the microinvalidation. I think I do realize she is the one doing the reports most of the time. I have not dealt with her on reports before. So I gave her all details how to do it even I knew she might have known how and what to do.  I felt embarrassed when she told me she did this for more than five years. I was thinking “just in case” she did not know how to do it. I was with good intention to remind her what and how to do it. But in this way, I was invalidating her capability and knowledge and experience she had in her profession. She is an accountant. Of course, she should have known how to do it. She might feel bad as the boss did not know what jobs she was doing and how.  It was not nice to have a non-professional to tell a professional what to do her job.  I apologized for sending her an email.

Why did I send her email like this? I think her appearance and dress code in the office is very casual. In this way, she has not given me the confidence level that she can perform the professional job as an accountant. Further, I don’t have to deal with her directly most of the time. I do not know how well she performs so far.  It is my discrimination and stereotype based on her outlook, appearance and dress code that affect my judgement on her. So never make assumption or judgement on a person based on outside. In fact, all the documents she sent me were perfect and professionally presented.

Culture and diversity - week 3

My Blog- week 3

Comments from friends about culture and diversity:

King: Culture is about race. Each race has their customs, codes, dances, singing and habit.
Diversity means each culture is different and unique to its group. Cultural diversity refers to the differences in each culture.

Gi: Each country has its culture. American culture is very different from Chinese. Culture includes elements such as traditions, history, customs and race.
One culture is diverse from the other. Within each culture, there is also diversity. For examples, in China, the Chinese culture for each province is also different. The culture of the ethnic groups in China is also different from each other. That is diversity.

June: Culture should include the country or an ethnic group’s arts, writing, languages, clothing customs, cuisine, toys, lifestyles, houses and a lot.
Diversity simply refers to differences within a culture. For instance, diversity can be in religion. Same culture may have different religions. In countries like USA, everyone has the freedom in religion. It can be Buddhism, Christian, Protestantism, Muslin and others. Each belief is different from the others. So it can also be seen as diversity.

My reflection:

In a study of surface culture and deep culture, the above answers are all covered. I like the picture of “Iceberg concept of culture” drawn by Indiana of Education Department. It divides the culture to “surface culture” and “Deep culture”. Surface culture is above the sea level with relatively low emotional load. Deep culture is further categorized to unspoken rules and unconscious rules. Unspoken rules are partially below sea level with very high emotional load. The unspoken rules are completely below sea level with intense emotional load. Most of the description above belongs to surface cultures, such as food, dress, arts and language. Codes, customs, lifestyle and history are “deep culture” category.

For diversity, the concept is similar. It is about the diversity between cultures and within the cultures. It also related to the dominant culture concept how we should respect, accept and accommodate the other cultures as well. Furthermore, cultural identities, social identities, family culture and identities are also diversities of culture from different perspectives.
The omissions from the above definition are cultural continuity and discontinuity, cultural invisibility, and transformation of culture etc.

Culture can be very narrow or very board depending on perspectives and points of view and how much a person knows about culture. Most people will have very shallow view of culture covering the ‘surface culture” definition. Knowing other’s definitions will help me dig deeper into the “Deep culture” so that I can understand better the real meaning of culture and deep down to its roots. With cultural diversity, we as an early childhood educator have to develop “a culturally consistent and respectful program” (Derman-Sparks & Olsen Edwards, 2010) for the children so that they can accommodate the diversity in culture.

References:

Derman-Sparks L. & Olsen Edwards J. (2010).  Anti-bias Education for your children and ourselves pp56-61. NAEYC.

Indiana Department of Education. Iceberg concept of culture. Extracted from http://www.msdwt.k12.in.us/msd/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/iceburgofculture.pdf

Smidt S. (2013). The Developing Child in the first 21^st century, a global perspective on child development, pp 92-96.   Routledge.

Assignment 2 - Three items I will bring along...

The three items I will like to bring along are:

Genealogy showing the genealogical tree – this is the booklet showing the genealogical tree of a family tracing back to their original ancestor. Most Chinese families have this record. It is based on the surnames of the family. The most common used Chinese surnames in China are around 100. According to Chinese belief, we might all come from the same ancestor back to thousands of years before. To the old Chinese, this is an important document of the family.

Chinese perpetual lunar calendar – it is a Chinese lunar calendar showing the seasons of thousand years. It indicates all the seasons of the year particularly for cultivation and farming, such as when the best time to do seeding, harvesting, etc. It also shows the counting of the years of the 12 symbolic animals associated with a 12-year cycle. Information about when the rising tide and low tide time of the month, when to do the worship of ancestor, which date to build the house, which date to get married etc are all listed in the calendar. It is the collection of thousands of years’ history and statistics to come up with such calendar. It is very Chinese culture.

Photos of my family – I will pick a photo with all the family members together. Our family will always take a family photo annually during Chinese New year. This is the most treasure of all as everyone is there in the photo. Family is always the priority in our culture. Unlike western world, family overrides individualism and self-independence.

 
Genealogy tells the origin of our family, our culture and relationship with each other in the family tree as well as the origin place of our ancestors. The perpetual lunar calendar reminds our family the seasons and dates and time of the years for various activities. Of course, the photo is obvious showing the importance of the family concept. They are all meaningful to me.

I will be very upset to give up two of the items since these are things representing my culture and family culture. These things can remind my family our roots. If I have to give up two items, I will keep the photo as it is the most important to me.

This is an interesting exercise. It gives me a chance to think what three important things about my family culture and I never think of it before. Everyone’s answer may be different as the values of each family may be varied. That is why there is always diversity in the society. Even people coming from the same ethnic group, they might be different. Like in China, all people are Chinese. There are a lot of similarities among us. But among the Chinese, there are more than 52 different ethnic groups. Each group has their own culture, traditions, customs, values, codes of behavior and languages. Diversity exists even in the same ethnic group if we take the boarder definition of diversity.

Dear Friends,
thankyou for viewing my blog on this assignment.
Due to the blockage of access of blogs in China, I might be a bit late to post my works here. Sorry for the troubles,
tks
stella