Early Childhood Education Across the World

After reading the blog assignment for this week, I immediately started sending e-mails to all of the organizations listed by The Global Alliance of NAEYC.   Because my husband is Serbian, I was most interested in The Center for Interactive Pedagogy in Serbia.  However, I decided that the more messages I sent out, the better chance I had of establishing contact with somebody.  The following day, I excitedly checked my e-mail expecting to find messages from all over the world.  what I found was a lot of my messages returned marked undeliverable, and no responses at all.  


Well, I didn't give up there.  I had just gone to see the Justin Beiber movie and decided to "Never Say Never."  The innovative and successful thing Justin Beiber did that led to his unprecedented swift success was advertise himself through social networking.  Justin posted messages on twitter and grew a fan base at an exponential rate.  I decided to try to find people willing to communicate with me through facebook.





I searched facebook for international early childhood organizations.  I found several and joined their facebook pages.  On each I posted a wall message asking if there would be anyone interested in corresponding with me.  I then scrolled through the member lists, picked out people whose names and pictures looked interesting to me (since that was all of the information that there was available to me), and began sending messages via facebook to individuals around the world.  All together I probably sent about fifty messages, and I got two responses.  These two responses, however, had me so excited.


One response was from Kristín Dýrfjörð in Iceland and the other was from Bessie Rios in The Phillipines.  Both expressed their willingness to correspond with me about the Early Childhood field where they live.  I sent each a message of thanks, some information about myself and about my understanding of the assignment.


I was thinking about what an amazing form of communication computers and social networking really are.  On pages like facebook, you can send instant messages out to people across the planet who share similar interests to you.  It really does bring us all closer together.  So, thanks Justin for such a brilliant idea.


While I was searching for international contacts, I came across the World Forum Foundation: Nature Action Collaborative for Children (NACC) http://www.worldforumfoundation.org/wf/nacc/index.php.  I quickly decided to join and become involved in this initiative.  If I were to choose one issue of importance to focus on throughout my career in Early Childhood Education it would be what has been termed "Nature Deficit disorder."  I spent my childhood outdoors, and I feel an enormous love for and connection to the natural world.  I have a strong belief that children are an integral part of nature and need to explore the outdoor world in order to develop normally.  I feel it is my personal mission to expose all of the children to nature as much as possible in order to lessen the adverse effects of growing up in the electronic age. 

"Children in today's world are being adversely affected by their diminishing connection with the natural world." (NACC)

"As a child, one has that magical capacity to move among the many eras of the earth; to see the land as an animal does; to experience the sky from the perspective of a flower or a bee; to feel the earth quiver and breathe beneath us; to know a hundred different smells of mud and listen unself- consciously to the soughing of the trees."  Valerie Andrews, A Passion for this Earth