Racial Microaggressions In Everyday Life

Recently I went on a trip on a with my family, and we took a train early in the  morning. There were only a few passengers,and the attendant told us to sit anywhere, so we choose seats near the front of the train and across the aisle from one another.

At the last minute, three White men entered the train and took seats in front of us. Just before takeoff, the flight attendant, who is White, asked if we would mind moving to the back of the train to better accommodate everyone . We grudgingly complied but felt singled out as passengers of color in being told to "move to the back of the bus." When we expressed these feelings to the attendant, she indignantly denied the charge, became defensive, stated that her intent was to ensure the trains safety, and wanted to give us some privacy.

Since we had entered the train first, I asked why she did not ask the White men to move instead of us. She became indignant, stated that we had misunderstood her intentions, claimed she did not see "color," suggested that we were being "oversensitive," and refused to talk about the matter any further.

Perspectives on Diversity and Culture

Cultural perspectives impact the way children participate in education.  The table below describes different expectations about "normal" school behavior for students from individualist and collectivist cultures.

Individualist and Collectivist Cultural Perspectives on Education

Individualist Perspective	Collectivist Perspective
Students work independently; helping others may be cheating.	Students work with peers and provide assistance when needed.
Students engage in discussion and argument to learn to think critically.	Students are quiet and respectful in class in order to learn more efficiently.
Property belongs to individuals, and others must ask to borrow it.	Property is communal.
Teacher manages the school environment indirectly and encourages student self - control.	Teacher is the primary authority, but peers guide each other's behavior.
Parents are integral to child's academic progress and participate actively.	Parents yield to teacher's expertise to provide academic instruction and guidance.

Source: Adapted from Individualist and Collectivist Perspectives on Education, from the Diversity Kit (2002) Providence, R.I.: The Education Alliance.

The influence of culture on beliefs about education, the value of education, and participation styles cannot be overestimated. With Asian students, for example, tend to be quiet in class, and making eye contact with teachers is considered inappropriate for many of these children. In contrast, most European American children are taught to value active classroom discussion and to look teachers directly in the eye to show respect, while their teachers view students' participation as a sign of engagement and competence.

Another contrast involves the role of Hispanic parents in education. Parents from some Hispanic cultures tend to regard teachers as experts and will often defer educational decision making to them. In contrast, European American parents are often more actively involved in their children's classrooms, are visible in the classrooms, or volunteer and assist teachers .These cultural differences in value and belief may cause educators to make inaccurate judgments regarding the value that non–European American families place on education. While it is important to keep in mind that different cultural groups tend to follow particular language and interaction styles, there is tremendous variability within cultural groups. 

My Family Culture

I honestly don’t know of many things I will take, seeing that my family is already with me. If the question was stated differently I would haves stated my family. Seeing that will be already with me, I’ve chose three things that mean the most to me.

I’m the type of person that really doesn’t value material things. As long as my family and my health are intact, I’m a happy camper. So for starters I would like to take all the money in my account. Money is universal, so I don’t think that would be a problem. Money is the only thing that I would have a problem with if they said I could not bring it. My logic is that if I had money my family will be efficient.

My second item would be my cell phone. My cell phone contains my life. In my cell phone I have my contacts, and pictures. If I want to contact anyone, I would   need their information to contact them.

Lastly I would bring a necklace that my mom got for me. I absolutely love the necklace, and for personal reasons it mean a lot to me.

When I Think of Research

1. Good interpersonal skills trump everything.  If you don’t have them, then nothing else you do will matter.  People will not want to work with you.   Everything we do and seek to accomplish in life depends upon being able to work well with others.  In modern terms:  “don’t be a douche.”
2. Seek out and rely upon mentors.  You need to find the people whose point of view you respect and turn to them for advice.  Don’t ask them in some cheesy way to be your mentor, rather cultivate this type of relationship with them by going to them out of respect with genuine questions and rely upon them sincerely.  It should not be artificial and contrived.  Don’t make it contrived networking and politiking.  People naturally want to help others and to share their wisdom, so take advantage of this to learn and to grow.  Ultimately, everyone has something to share and to teach you.  When people see that you are earnest, that you respect them and that you rely upon their counsel, they will naturally come to respect you.  Express appropriate gratitude and appreciation for what others have done to help your way.
3. Focus on doing a really good job in everything you do.  Take the time to do things right, to do it right the first time and to do it on-time.  As Grandma says, “a job worth doing is a job worth doing right.”  Ultimately, if we just focus on doing a good job (and we are easy and pleasant to work with) then everything else will take care of itself with time.

Research Around The World

 I read an article that focused on research relating to promoting music in early childhood programs. The  intent of this program is to further the quality of research  in the field of early childhood music education and to stimulate thought and the practice of music in early childhood throughout the world. They bring music educators around  the world to learn and to share the newest ideas regarding research and pedagogical practices in early childhood music education. Their personal theories about the nature of music, the responsiveness of children, and what constitutes effective practice in bringing the two together interest other practitioners. 

The programs goals are :

1. promote music in the lives of young children, regardless of talent, to create an enhanced environment that will result in the well-being and development of the whole child;
2. provide an international forum for the exchange of ideas regarding music and the young child, birth to age eight (and even pre-birth, as more scientific knowledge becomes available in this area);
3. stimulate the growth of quality music instruction, teacher training and research in musical development and instruction with the young child;
4. learn ways that various cultures approach musical enculturation in the young child (i.e. natural absorption of the practices and values of a culture); compare and discuss similarities and differences in music instruction and music learning across cultures; and to
5. examine issues which are of importance to the future of music in the lives of young children such as the influence of mass media and technology; the rapid change of society; the role of the family in musical development; the role of culture and schooling in musical development; and preservation of cultural traditions in the light of the breakdown of cultural barriers.

To accomplish these goals the programl:

1. hold biennial conferences or seminars in conjunction with ISME world conferences every two years in a venue geographically near the site of the conference;
2. contribute to the ISME electronic newsletter regarding early childhood music education; solicit and publish articles in other ISME publications;
3. endorse extra occasional courses which would focus in greater depth in promoting the general practices and principles of the commission. Endorsement of any proposed course, seminar, or conference will require a unanimous vote of approval from all six Commission Members currently serving, and would involve no financial support;
4. present early childhood sessions at ISME world conferences; and
5. work to reach early childhood music educators throughout the world - to maintain regular contact through the ISME electronic newsletter, the Commission Web Site, and biennial conferences and seminars.

Research that Benefits Children and Families—Uplifting Stories

Resilience in children refers to individuals who are doing better than expected, given a history that includes risk or adverse experience. Simply put, resilience requires two conditions to be met: (1) the child must have experienced some sort of risk or adversity that has been linked with poor outcomes, and (2) the child is generally doing okay despite being exposed to that risk or adversity; they are not showing that poor outcome.

The dominant view is that resilience is a description of a group of children. It is not a trait or something that some children 'just have.' There is no such thing as an 'invulnerable child' who can overcome any obstacle or adversity that she encounters in life. Resilience is not a rare and magical quality. In fact it is quite common. Resilience is the product of a large number of developmental processes over time that has allowed children who experience some sort of risk to continue to develop competently (while other children have not).Research on 'protective factors' has helped developmental scientists to understand what matters most for resilient children. Protective factors are characteristics of children or situations that particularly help children in the context of risk. There are many different protective factors that are important for resilient children. Two that have emerged time and again in studies of resilient children are good cognitive functioning (like cognitive self-regulation and IQ) and positive relationships (especially with competent adults, like parents). Children who have protective factors in their lives tend to do better in some risky contexts when compared to children without protective factors in the same contexts. However, this is not a justification to expose any child to risk. Children do better when not exposed to high levels of risk or adversity.

Resesarch

 the United States, children who experience homelessness are a group that tend to encounter higher rates of adversity, including those literally related to residential instability (e.g., loss of home or social connections)  as well as other stressful life events like exposure to domestic violence or parental incarceration. In addition, children in homeless families tend to be in single-parent, low-income households. Because of the presence of these risks, homeless children usually are considered to be at the high end of a continuum of poverty-related risk.

Despite these risks, many homeless children manifest resilience by continuing to show developmental competence. For example, multiple studies have found that many individual homeless children have reading and math achievement scores that were in the range expected for any student, even though average scores for homeless children as a group were much lower than other children in the same school district.

Not surprisingly, the protective factors that help keep development on-track for homeless children are generally the same ones that matter for other at-risk groups of children: better cognitive functioning (such as IQ and executive function skills) and positive relationships with at least one competent adult (especially parents).

Research on resilience among children experiencing homelessness has increasingly taken a developmental-ecological perspective, with an emphasis on untangling the complex developmental processes that contribute to, or interfere with, positive adaptation. A demonstration of this involves the interplay between two protective factors: positive parenting and good cognitive functioning. Kindergarten-aged children staying in family emergency housing did better at school if they had more competent parents or if their parents showed more positive parenting behaviors.More interestingly, competent and positive parenting was related to better child cognitive functioning (executive functioning and IQ scores) which, in turn, explained why these children did better at school. Meanwhile, children who showed better academic achievement in first grade were more likely to continue to show good achievement across the school years.Positive parenting seems to protect and encourage better cognitive functioning, which the child then ‘takes to school’ as a tool to help function competently in that context.

Research Stimulation: Resilence

Resilience is about how different people respond to threatening or stressful situations. A person's ability to be resilient can depend on circumstances - they may be able to overcome challenges in one situation but not in another. Furthermore, while one person may have difficulty handling a particular situation or use strategies that have negative outcomes for them, another may be able to overcome the same challenge easily. It is important to understand that resilience is not a fixed characteristic in an individual but is changeable and can be improved upon. Building and developing resiliency is a continuous process regardless of the starting point for the individual.

Resilience plays an important role in minimising the affects of negative events in young people's lives, therefore it is crucial to help them develop the ability to cope in spite of adversity and achieve positive outcomes.