Getting to Know Your International Contacts—Part 3

This week, I listened to the podcast  on the world forum foundation website.
http://worldforumfoundation.org/wf/wp/current-work/world-forum-radio
 I listened to Susan Lyon. She brought a 100 language exhibit to San Francisco. This website has information about the traveling exhibit. http://www.boulderjourneyschool.com/Pages/Visitors/Exhibit.html 
She started teaching children with learning and emotional disabilities. She saw windows into children's minds that were quite different. She tried to understand how children learned about the world. I personally, also find learning about how children learn fascinating. Currently, she is working with an Italian architect to rehab a San Francisco structure into the first Italian immersion preschool.

This week, I explored the web page for Unesco's "Early Childhood Care and Education". http://www.unesco.org/new/en/education/themes/strengthening-education-systems/early-childhood/

One of my professional goals is to become a Behavioral Specialist, this is the step above my current position. I learned from the Unesco website about a program called The Programme for the Education of Children in Need. This program was formed in 1992 and offers a future to vulnerable children through education. The field I am in, I work and will work with children with behavioral problems. Some of the children have had rough lives. I feel so much compassion towards these children. It was heartbreaking to read the issues that go on internationally. "Many are left to fend for themselves on city streets. Others are forcibly enrolled into armies, made to work for pitiable wages or sold into sexual slavery. Wherever they are, whoever they are, exposed to violence and exploitation, abandoned or without food and shelter, education remains one of the few routes left to address their intolerable and desperate plight." (From the Unesco Website).

Another one of my professional goals is to focus my work on the children who live in poverty. The insight I learned this week is "Because poverty may lead to diminished access to medical care, increased exposure to environmental risks, and malnutrition, ill health is also often a consequence of poverty. Accordingly, ill health is both a cause and a consequence of poverty: sick people are more likely to become poor and the poor are more vulnerable to disease and disability." We have been learning about consequences, intended or unintended in class. I feel that the ill health is an unintended consequence to poverty. I had not thought about the unintended consequences regarding poverty before reading this article.

My last professional goal is to eventually lead group sessions to help children express themselves. I found it interesting that there is a conference on the day that I am writing this blog-12/17/11-entitled Freedom of Expression is a Human Right. This is taking place in Iraq. There is a new draft legislation that would limit freedom of expression. This may end up passing. I found it interesting even though the conference is not focused directly on children, but on all people and the freedom of expression. I feel strongly that many children with behavioral problems do not have the freedom of expression and I would like to have groups that would allow the children to openly express themselves.