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Archive for the ‘Diversity equity and inclusion’ Category

In quotes: early education and African-American history

Posted in Diversity equity and inclusion, International, National, Pre-kindergarten, Quotes, tagged #BlackHistoryMonth, #ece on February 11, 2022| Leave a Comment »

In honor of #BlackHistoryMonth, we're highlighting "Early Childhood Pioneers" and their important contributions to #earlychildhood development! First up, #BetseyStockton, a freed slave who dedicated her life to educating children. #ECE pic.twitter.com/6BSncKlPwP
— ZERO TO THREE (@ZEROTOTHREE) February 8, 2022

“Too often neglected in the history of early childhood education are the stories of women teachers and especially African American women teachers. Find out more about Betsey Stockton, a pioneer early childhood teacher and an African American freedwoman living in the 19th century. Stockton traveled extensively, establishing schools for Hawaiian children and adults on Maui, preschools for African American children in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and preschools for Aboriginal children in Canada. After settling in Princeton, New Jersey, she organized and taught in schools for African American children for 30 years, until her death in 1865. Her story shows how one teacher engaged with new approaches to teaching young children and positively impacted the lives of hundreds of children and their families over several generations.”

— “Black History and Early Childhood Education: Five Resources to Explore for Black History Month,” NAEYC, February 3, 2022

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Introducing our new Advocacy Network

Posted in Child care, Diversity equity and inclusion, Early educators, Funding, MA Legislature, Massachusetts Cities and Towns, Pre-kindergarten, Professional development & preparation, Strategies for Children, tagged #Advocacy, #EarlyEducators on January 13, 2022| 4 Comments »

Here at Strategies for Children, we are excited to announce the launch of our new Advocacy Network for Early Education and Care, a year-long advocacy experience for emerging leaders in the field.

To launch the first cohort, we’ve chosen nine new and established leaders from across Massachusetts, including four from Boston. They are all passionate about advocating for children, families, and educators in their communities, and they want to learn new advocacy skills and knowledge to improve programs, communities, and policies. This cohort approach is similar to the one we used to create our Speakers’ Bureau, a program that prepared early educators to use their voices and share their stories with the media or through event panels or at State House rallies.

“Since the pandemic began, the team at Strategies for Children has learned so much about how to engage the field in advocacy,” says Titus DosRemedios, Strategies’ deputy director. “Our daily 9:30 calls informed our approach to the Speakers’ Bureau, which in turn inspired and helped shape the Advocacy Network.”

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Creating pathways to entrepreneurial leadership in early education – a guest blog post

Posted in Child care, COVID-19, Dept. of Early Education and Care, Diversity equity and inclusion, Early educators, Guest Blog, Higher Education, National, Pre-kindergarten, Professional development & preparation, tagged #EarlyEdMA, #EarlyEducators, #ece on December 7, 2021| 1 Comment »

This is a guest blog post by Anne Douglass, professor of Early Care and Education at UMass Boston and the founding executive director of the Institute for Early Education Leadership and Innovation.

Anne Douglass

Early educators are smart, kind, engaging, and supportive and dedicated.

Here at UMass Boston, we also know that early educators are entrepreneurial leaders. That’s why our programs provide an education that boosts their leadership, creativity, and innovation – all to create a better early learning experience for children.

Examples of early educators’ entrepreneurship abound. Last month, the Cape Cod Times featured a front page story about Nature Preschool Explorers, a nature-based preschool at the Long Pasture Wildlife Sanctuary in Barnstable. The four-year-old school was touted as an example of the wave of educational programs focused on the outdoors that are popping up across the country.

The school was cofounded by Diana Stinson, an alum of UMass Boston’s Post-Master’s Leadership Certificate in Early Education Research, Policy, and Practice (PMC) offered by our Institute for Early Education Leadership and Innovation (Early Ed Leadership Institute). (more…)

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Welcoming LGBTQ+ families: a conversation with Ellie Friedland

Posted in Child care, Demographics, Developmentally appropriate practice, Diversity equity and inclusion, Early educators, Family engagement, Pre-kindergarten, Professional development & preparation on November 11, 2021| Leave a Comment »

Photo: Karolina Grabowska from Pexels

About 20 years ago, Wheelock College brought in trainers to teach a noncredit course for early educators called “Making Room in the Circle,” which covered how to welcome LGBTQ families into early childhood settings.

Some 50 early educators enrolled – and so did Wheelock professor Ellie Friedland along with other Boston area faculty.

Ellie Friedland

“The idea was that Wheelock professors who took the course would then go on to teach a for-credit course for students,” Friedland says.

“One of the stories I like to tell is that when I proposed the course to the faculty at Wheelock College, there were no questions. Everyone immediately said, of course.”

Friedland doesn’t teach the class on her own.

“I’m straight and cisgender, so that’s something I use in various ways in my workshops. But I never teach the class alone; it has to be co-taught by someone who identifies as something other than straight.”

“What we found was that there were always students who took the course because they were already immersed and active. And there were students who took the course because they didn’t know anything and felt the responsibility to learn. And there were students who took it because they were questioning their own identities. And for all students it was vital to have a professor they could identify with and feel comfortable with.”

Today, Friedland is still a professor at Boston University Wheelock College of Education & Human Development, and she is still sharing the importance of welcoming LGBTQ+ families, teaching classes, running workshops, and talking to Strategies for Children’s 9:30 callers.

We asked Friedland what barriers early educators face in welcoming families.

Her answer: “Fear.” (more…)

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9 principles for building better child care systems

Posted in Child care, Cost and affordability, COVID-19, Diversity equity and inclusion, Early educators, Family engagement, Funding, National, Pre-kindergarten, Professional development & preparation, QRIS, tagged #earlychildhood, #SolveChildCare on September 28, 2021| Leave a Comment »

Photo: Yan Krukov from Pexels

What’s the best way to invest in early education and care?

State advocates have come up with nine guiding principles for policy leaders.

These policies are “designed to help create one mixed delivery system of care that is equitable and inclusive of all providers including family child care, public and private child care centers, Head Start, and public schools,” The Alliance for Early Success explains on its website where the nine principles are listed.

These principles also:

• focus on family choice and preferences

• ensure access to quality programs for all families

• create supply that can meet demand, and

• respond to communities’ needs and values

The nine principles are:

• make child care affordable
Families living at or below the poverty level would not have to pay a fee for child care. And no family would pay more than 7 percent of their income.

• fund the real cost of care
Child care providers should receive government funding that is based on the actual, full costs of providing high-quality care.

• enact reforms and policies that are equitable
Equitable reforms and policies should benefit all families and invest additional resources in “communities that have been traditionally underserved.” (more…)

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A new survey asks families about child care

Posted in Boston, Child care, Cost and affordability, Diversity equity and inclusion, Early educators, Family engagement, Massachusetts Cities and Towns on September 8, 2021| Leave a Comment »

Photo: nappy from Pexels

There’s a new child care survey for Massachusetts parents.

So please ask the parents in your programs to fill it out. It should take less than five minutes.

“Help us to identify what is most important to you as a parent/guardian of 0-5 year old child(ren),” the survey says. “We will use this information to guide expansion of child care supports.”

As we’ve blogged (here and here), gathering data from families is a crucial step in developing successful child care policies.

The survey is the result of a partnership between the Boston Public School’s Department of Early Childhood; the City of Boston’s Economic Mobility Lab — a team of social entrepreneurs who work in the Mayor’s Office of Policy to “advance the upward economic mobility of Bostonians;” and the Boston Opportunity Agenda, which is part of StriveTogether, “a national network of local communities striving to achieve racial equity and economic mobility.” (more…)

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Leading the Way: Marcela Simpson

Posted in COVID-19, Diversity equity and inclusion, Early educators, Family child care, Massachusetts Cities and Towns, Pre-kindergarten, Professional development & preparation on May 14, 2021| 1 Comment »

Photo courtesy of Marcela Simpson

All Marcela Simpson wanted was a part-time job to carry her through to graduation. She was living in her native country of Honduras and majoring in business administration at UNITEC, the Central American Technological University.

Simpson applied for a position at a school called La Estancia, a renown bilingual school where she met the school’s director, Ana Aviles, who assigned Simpson to be a lead teacher in a preschool classroom.

“That’s where it all started. I learned that I loved children,” explains Simpson.

Because her grandfather insisted, Simpson completed her Business Administration degree and came to the United States to get her master’s degree from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where she studied with George Forman, coauthor of The Hundred Languages of Children: The Reggio Emilia Approach to Early Childhood Education.

Simpson went on to work at the Winston Prouty Center for Child and Family Development in Vermont, an early education program that provides inclusive classes for both typically developing children and for children with special needs and rights. In this position, she worked with teachers, assistant teachers, and paraprofessionals providing them with educational resources and sharing opportunities for professional development.

“Based on this experience, I felt the need to learn more about adult learning,” Simpson recalls, “and that guided me to a whole different place.” She contacted the local Resource and Referral Agency in Western Massachusetts and they connected her to provide professional development and coaching opportunities. She also joined the Institute for Professional Education, where she learned more about adult learning theories and principles.

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Reaching out to immigrant parents

Posted in Child care, COVID-19, Demographics, Diversity equity and inclusion, English language learners, Family engagement, Massachusetts Cities and Towns on April 6, 2021| 1 Comment »

Screenshot: MIRA Coalition report

How well is Massachusetts reaching out to the nearly 481,000 immigrant parents who live in the state? The MIRA Coalition did a study to find out.

“The barriers faced by immigrant parents have been particularly evident during the COVID-19 pandemic, as families have struggled to maintain access to state-sponsored early childhood programs, K-12 schools, community-based organizations and various social services,” MIRA says in a new report summarizing its findings.

“As remote learning requirements have forced parents to provide supplemental instruction and monitoring for online learning, parents who are limited-English proficient (LEP) have lower levels of education or digital literacy, have faced disproportionate challenges.”

The research focused on families in the cities of Lawrence, Brockton, Everett, Springfield, and Worcester. And researchers interviewed 80 service providers and policy experts.

Among the findings: (more…)

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A statement from Strategies for Children: Our work continues

Posted in COVID-19, Developmentally appropriate practice, Diversity equity and inclusion, Federal, MA governor, MA Legislature, MA state budget, NAEYC, National, Pre-kindergarten, Strategies for Children on January 12, 2021| Leave a Comment »

Photo: Alyssa Haywoode for Strategies for Children

“We recommit ourselves to achieving racial equity in early childhood and school-age programs through advocacy, action, and policy change. Together we will stand up, speak out, and work to dismantle the historical systems of racism and inequity.”

These are the last two lines in our Collective Statement on Racial Justice that over thirty organizations signed on to in June 2020.

As we reflect on the horrific events this week – a violent assault on our democracy – we must redouble our efforts to work for the change we want to see in local communities, in Massachusetts, and across our country.

NAEYC has resources on trauma, stress, and violence for early childhood educators working to support children in many different settings along with the guidance in NAEYC’s Advancing Equity in Early Childhood Education position statement to support your conversations with them, as well as families and colleagues. If you need more resources or would like to sign your organization on to our Collective Statement, email us.

Despite the trauma of this week, democracy continues. (more…)