Brazil
My first insight is strengthening leadership around early childhood development through an executive leadership course for policymakers. The first three cohorts of 40–45 senior-level Brazilian policymakers came to Harvard in 2012, 2013, and 2014 for an intensive week of instruction, skill-building, and project development. Participants returned home and continued to work in small groups to develop and refine action plans for implementation in their jurisdictions. Follow-on activities included reconvening in São Paulo for a workshop on implementing policy change in Brazil, a day for program alumni to meet and learn about each other’s work, and the April 2015 launch of a complementary instructional and skill-building program in Brazil for municipal level leadership and state and federal mid-level technical staff (http://developingchild.harvard.edu/about/what-we-do/global-work/). The video of Mary E. Young stated that policymakers need to understand the science and important of early learning. The class was to bring Brazilian people and policy makers in together to know how to bridge the gap fro early learning, and to see why it is so important to invest in early childhood.
My second insight- Launching an innovation cluster to bring researchers, practitioners, and program developers together to co-design and test new strategies for addressing childhood issues in Brazil–and then to share their successes and failures (http://developingchild.harvard.edu/about/what-we-do/global-work/). Practitioners and researchers devote a lot of time and resources to make sure a program is effective. They collaborate to identify what is working and what is not working. They want to understand the implications of what they are learning. Then they build on the information what each one have found.
My third insight- There are resources for the Brazilians. These resources are Portuguese resources. The video talks about different subjects regarding children and families. One of the video is on the Three Core Concepts in early development. It states that if a child have a healthy development when they are young; it gives them the building blocks for lifelong health, success in parenting for the next generation, strong communities and educational achievement. It also illustrate how neuroscience gives a better view of how long early experiences are built into our brains and bodies.
Reference
Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University. (2010). Global Children's Initiative.
Retrieved from: http://developingchild.harvard.edu/about/what-we-do/global-work/.
My big take away from your blog post is "policymakers need to understand the science and important of early learning". Brazil or otherwise, this holds true for all countries. I even think that those in the profession truly need to understand it all as well so that more can advocate and talk to policy makers about it. Being on a couple state committees it has opened my eyes as to how many are in the profession and don't really know what they are talking about sometimes. Some of them try to be advocates, so they at least have that part down, but when they send the committee correspondence it is very evident sometimes that they really have no idea what they are talking about. Luckily everyone on the committees I am on are all formally educated in early childhood education and work in the field so we know when it is faulty information, but for policy makers that don't know what is true or not, if they are getting this correspondence, they make take it as truth because it is coming from those in the field. So even more reason they are educated.
ReplyDeleteHi Guadalupe,
ReplyDeleteI like the the thir insight when you state, " It states that if a child have a healthy development when they are young; it gives them the building blocks for lifelong health, success in parenting for the next generation, strong communities and educational achievement." I like that, and think it totally agree. Great post
Hello Guadalupe,
ReplyDeleteWhat a great post. Very informative and I was able to learn more about in early childhood in Brazil.