April 21, 2009
· Filed under articles
April 21, 2009 , ExchangeEveryday
Children with challenging behavior is far and away the leading training priority for teachers identified in our current Exchange Insta Poll. And, this has been true for over five years of doing this survey. [If you want to share your views on Teacher Training Needs, you still have 16 hours to participate in the Exchange Insta Poll.] A number of reasons have been proposed for this phenomenon:
- Cultural: Children today, from the earliest ages, are exposed to enormous amounts of violence on television, videos, and computer games and are given the message that you solve problems with aggression.
- Societal: This theory points the finger at parents whose lives are so hectic and stressful that they are not spending enough time nurturing their children and helping them develop self control.
- Environmental: Contaminants and additives in the air we breathe, the fast food we consume, and water we drink are polluting and impacting our children’s health and dispositions.
- Professional: In classrooms of highly functioning teachers, there is little misbehavior to manage — children are engaged. The prevalence of misbehavior in programs is attributable to low pay and low skills of our workforce.
We hesitate to select any one of these theories as the answer. But, it is clear that children’s challenging behavior is an issue our field needs to address in order for children to have positive, nurturing experiences in our programs.
April 17, 2009
· Filed under Uncategorized
April 16, 2009
In the introduction to their article “Play and Cultural Differences” (which is one of more than 90 articles in the new Exchange resource, Promoting the Value of Play CD Book), Elizabeth Jones and Sharon Cronin observe…
“Culture — a people’s way of behaving, being in, and understanding the world — is learned by each new generation through a process of enculturation. A culture’s solutions and life strategies are acquired by children as they watch and listen — and reinvented as they imitate, talk, and play. Language, including both words and art forms, is central to the unity of a culture.
“In the first five years of life, children learn to ta lk their people’s language and play their people’s daily life scripts — homemaking and going places, talking to friends and buying and selling, making and fixing, singing and dancing, and storytelling and celebrating rituals. Children’s imitative and playful grounding in their culture is the foundation for identity development and for trust in the world as a predictable and meaningful place.
“For many children, this learning process is disrupted by racism and other biases that devalue their home culture, or by sustained discontinuous experiences that ignore it. A child in out-of-home care will be aware both of differences and of the unspoken values attached to these differences: Are my language, my hair and skin, my games — myself — welcome here? Am I expected to change in order to be acceptable? Child care can be an alienating experience — or an affirming one.
“If no one in the child care program speaks the child’s language, if none of the toys recreate home, if no familiar adult is present in a caregiving role, the young child is thrust into the confusing but all-too-common experience of stranger care — of long days in a setting which doesn’t resemble home and whose people will have no lasting relationship with the child’s family. In such a setting, it’s hard to play and learn.”
Taken from ExchangeEveryDay, a free service of Exchange Magazine.
