Blog: Professional Hopes and Goals

During the first course in this program, I helped to establish and became part of a collaborative learning community. As the courses have progressed, colleagues and I have been studying together and supporting each others goals with regard to taking on and mastering the challenges of this MS Early Childhood Studies program

As I prepare to move on to my final course before the specializations, I took time to think about my aspirations with regard to diversity, equity, and social justice, the different ways in which my colleagues have supported me and how I have supported them, and what I wish for my colleagues as they continue on their professional path.

One hope that I have when I think about working with children and families who come from diverse backgrounds are for me to leave my personal basis aside and get to know each family and student on an individual basis by spending quality time with them and developing a relationship with them where we can listen to each other and work together so that we can have a positive impact in each others lives and take what we have learned into our perspective communities and make a difference there as well.

One goal I would like to set for the early childhood field related to issues of diversity, equity, and social justice is to open the lines of communication between staff, families, and their children so that we can engage in dialogue that can hopefully bury some of our fears of not knowing each other and forming opinions of each other based on our visible identities but instead to form relationships that gives us some background knowledge of each other and form healthy opinions based on the way each person is treated as an individual and not for the way society judges us.

I would like to thank all of my colleagues for all of the encouraging posts to my blog and for constantly encouraging me to think about thinking. I would also like to say that some of the issues we discussed were sensitive to some groups and everyone was very respectful to each others differences and were honest in terms of acknowledging if they were privileged or non privileged and for giving positive feedback as to how I handled social injustice and what I can do to make a difference within my community.

Thanks and I enjoyed working with all of you and I look forward to “seeing” you next course.

Best of luck,

Nicky