Saturday, February 9, 2013

Research Around The World

The link I chose was for Early Childhood Australia. Some of the current international research topics include learning an teaching through play, experiences of accessing quality long day care in northern regional Australia, leading literacy learning through family, and the perspective of indigenous early childhood workers on suporting the engagement of indigenous families in early childhood settings. What I found to be extremely interesting was all the conferences availabe to early childhood educators and parents.  One that caught my attention was the conference on autism/asperger syndrome.  My cousin has a child who was recently diagnosed with autism and her child's physician has only been able to tell her very litte about this syndrome.  I am not aware of these types of conferences being offered where she or I reside.  If so, I would certainly hope that she would attend.  I would also hope that the early childhood educators in MS would attend as well.  In North Brisbane the conference is a full day of immediately useful solutions to assisting young people with austim or asperger syndrome improve communication, social, behavioural and general life skills.  Endless examples are provided of successful interventions to help combat sensory difficulties and stress overload and showcases effective classroom practice and useful resources. I found this to be a very interesting way to help parents and educators with understanding more and being able to assist children with autism or asperger have better quality of lives. Several early childhood educators I have spoken with are fearful of having a child with either syndrome in the classroom because they simply do not know how to care for the child....."when you know better, you do better".

7 comments:

  1. I agree Towanda, 'when you know better you do better'. Educators should be very knowledgable in this area, we will encounter these children one time or another, and we should know how to assist them without fear. Thanks for your information.

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  2. Workshops for parents in support of working with children with special needs are hard to come by in any state, my guess is funding. Like you I am pleasantly surprised of its offering in Australia what a benefit for those families especially with Autism and Aspergers Syndrome, they can very difficult for families to understand let alone support at home without guidance. Perhaps a non-profit that just provides parent workshops on a variety of topics would be something that would take off, food for thought. Thanks for sharing.

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  3. Towanda I really enjoyed your post! I have a family member that is autistic and it is very sad that some educators are not educated enough to deal with the differences that many children may have. Awesome post!

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  4. Towanda I to chose Early Childhood Australia. The website offers a lot of information about helping young children. The main thing that I liked about the website is how it stressed about being "a voice for young children". I feel it is very important that we assure that young children have a voice for them.

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  5. Towonda I enjoyed reading your post as you made some great points in reference to early childhood teachers and their views of working with children with autism. I believe that if we do a better job of educating our professionals on developmental and social disorders.

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  6. I quite agree with you Towanda, staying updated makes one very effective. I also visited early childhood Australia (ECA). In addition to these conferences, the webwatch of ECA also reported of a recent research outcome on autistic children in USA. There are indeed many resources in ECA. Thanks for sharing.

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  7. Towanda,

    I chose the ECA also. I love how the ECA wants to make sure that there is a collective effort with the local and national governments in Australia. I wish the U.S. would get more on the band wagon with this idea.

    Thanks,
    Kelly

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