Professional Contacts & Expanded Resources

This particular blog assignment has proved challenging.  At the beginning of the week I emailed 4 different sources which I found through the UNICEF website.  I was interested in making contact with professionals in the Early Childhood field in the following countries; Greece (because of my heritage, I am curious to see learn advancements in the EC field in a country where many women stay home to care for their children), Albania (because many refugees flee Albania and enter Greece as illegal immigrants, however entire families do not emigrate; families, including children are left behind.  I want to learn about the conditions of education as a whole in a country such as this), Kosovo (because I believe there are still many displaced families and orphans following the war there; how are all those orphans and refugee children being cared for?) and Morocco (this is a country I know very little about, however it is a country rich in culture and heritage that it would be interesting to learn about the state of EC education there). 

In an effort to stay ahead of the game in the event these international professionals do not reach out to me, I took a tour of the World Forum Foundation site and listened to two radio interviews.  The link for the web site world radio forum is as follows;

http://worldforumfoundation.org/wf/wp/current-work/world-forum-radio

One radio interview was with Susan Lyon, who views children as individual thinkers who view the world and understand the world in their own manner.  She created a pilot program based on the Reggio Emilia program in a public setting to provide children an avenue of success.  The link to the podcast is below -

http://ccie-media.s3.amazonaws.com/podcasts/WFR_10_SusanLyon.mp3

The other radio interview was with Maysoun Chehab, of the Arabic Resource Collective in Beirut, Lebanon.  She worked effortlessly to raise awareness on children’s rights and to raise awareness and training of care givers on best practices.  She also began a psych-social support project to assist children, families and educators with coping and healing strategies following the 33 day war.  The link to the podcast is below -

http://ccie-media.s3.amazonaws.com/podcasts/WFR_04_MaysounChehab.mp3

Lastly I visited http://www.earlychildhoodaustralia.org, seeking to explore Early Childhood Education and resources from another country’s perspective.  I subscribed to ECA Web Watch newsletter and read the September 2011 issue found here; http://www.earlychildhoodaustralia.org.au/early_childhood_news/eca_webwatch_issue_122_september_2011.html

I came across an article on early childhood and education services of indigenous children.  The focus of the article dealt with the notion cultural competency as well as the idea that children can be more successful in later life when intervention in the areas of health and education begins at an early age.  The article can be found through the following link;  

http://www.aihw.gov.au/closingthegap/documents/resource_sheets/ctgc-rs07-updated.pdf