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Should daycare workers and preschool teachers be screened on the basis of being convergent, compliant and conventional? Or should we seek people who are capable and skilled at divergent, critical and creative thinking?

I think that daycare workers and preschool teachers should meet a number of criteria. First, we should be caring. Children require caring and nurturing people to care for them. This is why child care workers should first and foremost be caring; we should demonstrate that we care deeply about the well being of all children.

Second, child care workers should be ethical. Families depend on daycare workers and preschool teachers who take the ethics of non-parental group care seriously, as do the children with whom we work. Ethical practices and ethics of care should drive the work of all preschool teachers and daycare workers.

Third, we should take our humanity seriously, which is to say that child care workers should be deeply grounded people who think about culture, community, and human relationships. We should be cultural creators.

These criteria could include compliant, convergent, conventional, divergent, critical and creative ways of being and thinking, which is why child care workers should be comfortable with complexity and contradiction, diversity and difference. Being human, being ethical, being reflective and intentional, and being part of community should be our expertise.

I think that child care workers should think, live, drink, eat and breathe culture; all kinds of culture. This means that music, art, literature, science, myth, history, faith, food, dance, community, dress, action, game, tradition, text, talk, rhythm, beat, shape, form, pattern, number, symbol, play, place, building, style, value, belief and all other aspects of cultural and human life should be in our hearts, heads and bodies.

We should embrace the cultural life, and should bring the life of children’s and families’ cultures to life in the lives of the children with whom we work. Rich, deep, complex and creation should be at the heart of our work. And the leaders and decision makers of our occupation and vocation should encourage the creative to join our ranks, the divergent and critical to embrace life and meaning in many ways, the deep and reflective to lead our occupation.

While I think that there should be room in early education and care for those who prefer to see only simple shades of black and white, the willingness and desire to be put into small boxes should not be the sole, or even primary, basis for deciding who should become a daycare worker or preschool teacher.  And certainly complex, creative, divergent and different thinkers should not be excluded from practice on these bases.

People who do not see rainbows in everything, who do not want to think or be troubled by life’s complex nature, who prefer right answers over unresolved questions, who want to pass without making waves, and who feel okay parroting back simplistic solutions to pointless questions should not make up the majority of the daycare and preschool workforce. People with these mindsets should not be rewarded with easy paths to being licensed care providers, be quickly promoted to supervising and managing the child care workforce, and should be challenged to think in more critical, less simplistic, and deeper ways.

People who challenge authority, who respect difference, seek out complexity, find joy in story, shape and movement, feel passionately, walk to beats of different drummers and are creative and critical should be encouraged to adopt and reflect ethical practices in child care work, think critically about the meaning of child care work in the context of cultural, community and family life, and learn the skills of working with families, children and other child care workers.  We should be welcomed into the field, and not presented with barriers and roadblocks, or told we’re too deep, too complex, or too divergent to be able child care providers.

I do not think that being a creative, reflective and critical thinker should be the only skills required of the daycare worker, but  do think that these characteristics should be considered as both foundational and fundamental. They should be considered key screens by those with the power to decide who may or may not be licensed, lest we end up with only the unthoughtful, only the compliant, only the simplistic, only the reactive, only the authoritarian and only the convergent to design, implement and maintain our community’s daycares and preschools for young children.

Today I am participating in a conference on the human rights of the child. The conference feels more like two different events, as there are two very different sets of speakers throughout the overall conference. One set of speakers talks about statistics and law, often citing lines in an international treaty that they want the government to honour, and another set of speakers talks about their work as community, care and cultural workers, sharing stories and descriptions of their programs and projects.

One set talks statistics and uses studies of people to make claims about what is best for all children. Another set talks about their own values and beliefs, or about how they believe children ought to be treated. One set primarily uses stock photos to illustrate ideas stemming from population research, based on comparisons of differences between average scores of groups of children. Another set tells stories stemming from their own experiences with children and families.

The presenters who talk of studies are called experts. They work at universities and are researchers. They write the books and articles that inform and justify policies with implications for everyone. They serve on the councils, committees and boards that determine how public resources and community power is used. And they also train most of our leaders in universities. They train people how to measure things in an effort to simplify and understand humans, how to trust experts, how to think about things, and how to be powerful.

The presenters who talk of their programs and projects are called practitioners. As practitioners they are the “doers” of community life. When practitioners are influenced or controlled by experts, they become the forces that make expert ideas real, practised and powerful. As community workers, cultural workers, support workers and child care workers, practitioners do the work that makes, sustains and enriches communities.

Experts need practitioners to reflect and act on expert ideas – because without people acting on these ideas nothing will come of them. But do practitioners need experts? While the question may be too general to be useful, since there are times when we do need experts and times when we don’t, I still think it’s a good question to keep in mind when attending conferences like this.

So do we need experts? Perhaps we can answer this by imaging how to power a community without experts in electricity production. Truth is, I can’t imagine having electricity without knowledgeable and skilled people who know how to produce and distribute it.  But this does not mean that we need experts in values to make related decisions, such as how much electric power to have (which could include none at all), or how to use and distribute electric power, or what social and economic costs to pay for the production of electric power do not require experts. People do not need experts to tell them how to feel, what to value, or how to decide what they believe is best for their community.

What troubles me is that many of the expert speakers at this conference act as though they are entitled, perhaps by reason of being “smarter” than other people, to have greater influence in shaping or expressing community values than we – the non-experts – should have. This is reflected in many of the unmentioned assumptions of their work, such as the assumption that we can make meaningful conclusions about human ways of being by studying collapsed and simplistic measurements of behaviour. What gets lost in meaning when we reduce human behaviour in quantified and linear studies is huge, and important to know when evaluating the information.  The experts today and yesterday left this part of their expert knowledge out of their sweeping conclusions about what’s best and how’s best for everyone. It is also reflected in the unmentioned and underling values of their work, such as that some people should have more voice than others in community decision making, or that it is okay for some people to use the work and power of others without their meaningful consent.  Leaving out these beliefs is dishonest and not helpful, especially in the context of a forum for human rights.

The practitioners who I listened to at the conference did not trouble me in these ways. They talked as sharers with others, sharing their ideas, experiences, stories and beliefs with the people attending their sessions. The stories were often inspirational, such as a story about a year-long process of working with a family whose young child required extra support needs in order to communicate with others. At first the child’s father told her that he did not trust her, and did not want his child to go to preschool or to receive any supports to assist with his communication. She talked about how challenging this experience was for her, and how she was was faced with her agencies rules that would of created barriers in forming a relationship with the family. She also talked about her own fears and concerns for the child. And she talked about how she, over time, came to know the family and how trust was built over time. From this story we came to know the presenter as a person, and came to understand ourselves and the community she worked with better. She made no claim that her experience would be reflected in our work, or that we should respond in the same way that she did. She left that up to us, respecting our capacity to act and reflect, and to be wise.

Communities do not need experts to know how to be loving, supportive and responsive places. What we instead need is control over our own resources, our own work and our own power to realize what we already know and believe. When we trust ourselves as equally capable persons who know how to love and how to be, then we can use the tools and resources developed by expert tool makers in order to realize our own dreams and values for our communities in whole.E

Families should be the presumed initiators of the family-care worker relationship

As a child care worker I believe that my work is to provide care to families.  This means that our role as care providers is, simply put, to care for children at the bequest of families. This is best done in thoughtful, honest, caring and respectful ways. We provide care for children because families either want or need us to do this work.

I believe that child care work is immensely rewarding, because it benefits children and families, supports equity for women, provides a means of survival for underpaid workers, binds me to a community of care, and helps sustain a rich cultural and community life for everyone.  I want to live in a world that cares for, and respects, all people – including all children and all families.  I also want to do the cultural and community work that sustains such a place.

Through our cultural and community work, child care providers have a lot of power in the lives of children and families, and also in the community at large.  As with anyone in a position of power, we should carefully reflect on how we use our power – we should be intentional about for what purpose and in what way we use our power.

With power comes responsibility.  Because many families need child care to survive, and in fact have little choice over how to get the care that their children require, care workers often have the power to dictate the terms of care.  I believe that providing care in exchange for influence over how a family raises its own children is simply, and in almost all instances, an abuse of power. I also consider it an irresponsible use of power to employ the provision of care as a way to “get inside” a family to influence the cultural life of the family.

In exercising our power responsibly I believe that child care workers should recognize the primacy of a family in guiding and caring for their children.  This means that we should consider the family as the initiator of the relationship between us, the care worker, and the family.  We work with a child’s family at their bequest. Simply put, we work with a family because they want or need care for their child. The family asks us to care for their child, and we should proceed on that basis.The fact that families initiate the relationship should limit the power we exercise through our role as care providers.

Caring work is relationship work, because human care exists only in social relations. By nature a human relationship is a two-way process.  Even though the relationship is two-way and is between persons of equal inherent worth, the child care relationship should be guided by the principle that the family starts the relationship. The family has the primary role, relative to that of the care worker, in this relationship.

We should recognize that in many family-care worker relationships it is the care worker who has more power. This is because the family does not always have a choice of where, when, how or from whom to get care for their child.  The care provider could exercise their greater power to influence the child and the family, but should not.

I think which the exercise of this greater power is most often based on a false presumption of entitlement to intervention in the life of a family; it would therefore be an irresponsible use of power.  That is because care providers have no such entitlement, and have no basis to presume a right to use their power to influence the family in this way. We should should respect the family’s culture, their wishes for their children, their values and their place in world as human beings.  We should proceed knowing who initiates the relationship and respect the right of families to be their child’s primary caregiver.

This does not mean that care workers should become robotic in the “delivery” of child care.  Just as we, as child care workers, are not entitled to intervene in the lives of the families with whom we work based solely on the power we have when relating with families, families may not dictate to us how we’ll conduct our jobs.  We should retain power over the conduct or our work. And part of our work is to share our ideas, values, insights, knowledge, experience and ways of being with families.  We may influence families through honest dialogue.  We may not influence families through abuse of our power over families on the basis of our role as care providers to their children.

I will not acquiesce the central values that drive what I do as a care worker to anyone.  My job is to support the well-being of children and families. I intend to maintain the integrity of this work. This is especially important to me because I consider child care as sacred work, requiring integrity in every aspect of the work itself. The job of caring for children requires an honest dialogue, a two-way conversation between me and the children and the families with whom I work. There is no care without authentic relationships, no care without honesty, no care without integrity.

If the process of honest conversation is shut down, or is not respected by a family, then I cannot do what I value – which is care for children and work with families.   Each family that initiates a care provider relationship with me deserves (and requires) honesty and integrity from me. I require (and deserve) the same of them.  This is developed over time – there can be no hurrying of depth of knowing or trusting each other.  The caring relationship deepens over time.  But without such a deepening process taking place, there is little in way of authentic care being developed.  And there little hope that there will ever be a caring relationship.

We should also keep in mind that everyone in such a caring relationship – the child, the family, the care worker – has agency. Our unique wishes and interests, wants and needs, values and beliefs, and other cultural ways of being should be respected and nurtured because our agency as persons is a precious gift of the human condition.  Conflicts between people in a caring relationship should be honestly resolved.  What this requires is that we relate to each other as people.

Rich cultural life depends on a deeply experienced social life, which is only possible in honest dialogue.  When are dishonest with each other, when we hide our true selves, and when our relationships lack integrity and depth, then we fail to realize our potential as human beings.  This is an extreme form of poverty.  In place of such poverty I want to create richly experienced social and community life, rather than to live in poverty or to impose such a form of poverty on myself or on others.

The New York Times has an op-ed on Partners in Health, a human rights organization working with people in Haiti to support the development of the country’s health care sector.  Earlier in the week my good friends of the Coalition of the Immokalee Workers sent out an email with information about the organization’s commitment to providing supports for effective and community-based development of infrastructure.  Visit Partners in Health for information about how to donate to the humanitarian efforts of the organization. Here is more about the organization, from the op-end:

This week, the list of things that Haiti needs, things like jobs and food and reforestation, has suddenly grown a great deal longer. The earthquake struck mainly the capital and its environs, the most densely populated part of the country, where organizations like the Red Cross and the United Nations have their headquarters. A lot of the places that could have been used for disaster relief — including the central hospital, such as it was — are now themselves disaster areas.

But there are effective aid organizations working in Haiti. At least one has not been crippled by the earthquake. Partners in Health, or in Haitian Creole Zanmi Lasante, has been the largest health care provider in rural Haiti. (I serve on this organization’s development committee.) It operates, in partnership with the Haitian Ministry of Health, some 10 hospitals and clinics, all far from the capital and all still intact. As a result of this calamity, Partners in Health probably just became the largest health care provider still standing in all Haiti.

Fortunately, it also offers a solid model for independence — a model where only a handful of Americans are involved in day-to-day operations, and Haitians run the show. Efforts like this could provide one way for Haiti, as it rebuilds, to renew the promise of its revolution. read more

Image source: UNfreemedia.org

Why should we fight poverty in Canada when there’s more extensive poverty in other places?

I attended a screening of Four Feet Up tonight at an event organized by the Richmond Poverty Response Committee.  The film tells the story of child and family poverty in Canada, from the perspective of Isaiah, an eight year old child. Isaiah shares his insights on growing up with film maker Nance Ackerman, who places Isaiah’s story within the context of the economic conditions underlying child and family poverty in Canada.

A panel discussion followed the film, which included a conversation about differences between Canada (one of the richest countries in the world) and Haiti (one of the poorest countries). During this discussion the question was raised about why should people in Canada concern ourselves with poverty here, when there is much more extensive poverty in other places?  And why does the poverty in other places, like Haiti, seem to escape our attention, leading to inaction in the face of massive human suffering?

The earthquake in Haiti created a sudden humanitarian crisis caused by a natural disaster. This new disaster adds to a persistent and long standing humanitarian crisis, caused by the economic and political disasters of colonialism, slavery, corruption and exploitation of the people and resources of the country. Now is a natural time to reflect on the meaning of these tragedies, both in terms of the compounding effects of the earthquake and also of the ongoing indifference by many Canadian institutions to the suffering in Haiti for so many years.

Like most Canadians, I believe that a child born in Canada is born of equal worth as is a child born in Haiti (or born anywhere else in the world).  There is no choice between saving the life of a Canadian or saving the life of a Haitian.  The only choice is to create a global society that respects the lives of all human beings as born equally sacred and equally worthy of respect and dignity.  If you believe in human rights as reflections of universal and transformative values, then the question is not whose life matters most, but how to create a world where the human potential of everyone, everywhere is fully realized.  It is in this question that we (all humans) are called to create institutions in Canada, and everywhere else, to extend human rights values, until the vision of universal justice is achieved.

Creating and sustaining such a world requires a political solution, which starts and ends with institutions powerful enough to ensure that human rights are extended to all persons, in all places, at all times.  These institutions should be built wherever there is the need, the political will and the means for such institutions to be built and sustained, at whatever level is possible at the time. Our only constraints should be commitment to building power in sustainable and equitable ways, and moving fast enough to build on successes, but also carefully enough to stay on course for the long haul.

Our democracy, including its core institutions and the rule of law, should be treated as a cherished resource, a repository of the public trust passed to the current generation from those before us. It is from these legacies that we can take the next steps toward expanding our values and moving closer to achieving our vision of a just and equitable world. Our country’s legacies of public health, public education, public safety, public libraries, public power, public media, public arts and culture, public parks and other public sector institutions should be built upon in order to create new institutions that are committed to ensuring fairness and equity in the delivery of essential public services.  Other institutions are just as important to sustaining our quality of life and projecting human rights values.  These include institutions that support a skilled, organized and productive workforce, independent and reliable journalism, a co-ordinated and organized economy, and a vibrant and living community based on respect and inclusion of many cultures, languages, faiths and ways of being.

The base of what we have, and continue to build, provides our means for working with people throughout the world, in partnership and solidarity, so that we may help build infrastructures and institutions to extend human rights both within and beyond our borders. As we build institutions in Canada we grow the capacity for moving forward in the world, as we are part of the human family and the only way to build power for purpose is on top of already existing power, for that same purpose.  We will do this not by transplanting our organizations onto other communities, but by exchanging lessons learned with others, sharing resources on an equitable basis with everyone, building connections across communities, and developing leadership for human rights by working together for common purpose. Our institutions at home provide the leaders, resources and ideas in order to work in such partnerships. Without such institutions in places throughout the world, we (all humanity) will have no basis on which to extend and expand our values.

There is no choice between expanding human rights and helping others.  The assertion of this “choice” is based on a false dichotomy, one which leads to a decline in human rights values everywhere.  Canadians who are committed to human rights should work in co-ordination with others committed to these values, building many kinds of institutions, in many places, for many purposes, relevant to many local communities, at all levels (from local to global) and in many forms.  Each institution built should strengthen the capacity for future growth in other communities, or for other purposes, or at different levels, or in different forms.

Poverty ended in one place, out of concern for human dignity, makes ending poverty in the next part of the world more possible.  We should never forget that not only do we have the capacity to build things in more than one place at more than one time, but this is the only possible means to accomplish our vision, because the world is too big and time is too great to simply move in a linear direction or one step up at a time. There are people who are committed to love and justice everywhere.  And that is why it matters that people in Canada end suffering here, while also working with people in places like Haiti to end suffering there.  This is also the reason why it’s equally important that people in Haiti end poverty there, while also working with people in countries like Canada to help us end poverty here.  We can only achieve our vision by working in solidarity together.

Image source: UNfreemedia.com

The earthquake in Haiti is more than a natural disaster, as it is also a political, economic and social disaster. Haiti is one of the poorest countries in the world and suffers from the legacy of slavery and Western domination over its resources and people.  This legacy should not be ignored as Haitians recover from the devastating earthquake, in terms of the urgency of a response by the rest of the world to stand with the people of Haiti and also in terms of how we carry out the response. More than aid is required.  What is also needed is a commitment to work with Haitians to rebuild their country and community and to pay back to the people of Haiti what has been plundered from them.  The institutions that get build in response to this humanitarian crisis must be based on human rights, respect and dignity, and democracy from the bottom up.  If not, then the problems Haiti already faced before the earthquake may only get worse. And that would be a human-made tragedy following a natural disaster.

Here’s an update on Haiti from UNfreemedia.com:

Haiti’s president, René Préval, called the death toll “unimaginable” and  said he had no idea where he would himself sleep. Schools, hospitals and a prison collapsed. Former President Bill Clinton, the UN’s special envoy to Haiti expressed his concern in radio interviews yesterday.

The poor squatted glumly in the streets, bloodied and hungry with piles of corpses lying around. There were limbs sticking out of  piles of  concrete and shrieks and cries emanating from deep inside the wrecks of buildings .

No one could guess the number of of dead  or injured, but it is expected to reach the thousands.

“Please save my baby!” Jeudy Francia, a woman in her 20s, shrieked outside the St.-Esprit Hospital in the city the New York Times correspondent reported. Her child, a girl about 4 years old, writhed in pain in the hospital’s chaotic courtyard, near where a handful of corpses lay under white blankets. “There is no one, nothing, no medicines, no explanations for why my daughter is going to die.”

Governments and aid agencies brought supplies  but faced large obstacles a day after the powerful 7.0-magnitude earthquake hit.Flights were severely limited, telecommunications were barely functioning, the port was shut down and most of the medical facilities had been severely damaged, if not leveled. Power and phone service were out. read more

I think that “leader” is a more useful word than “advocate” for describing what’s needed to create a comprehensive system of adequate child care supports for B.C.’s children and families.  Many advocates are leaders, and I don’t want to dismiss the important work that many advocates do for children and families – the point is not create a choice between leaders and advocates.  I simply think that the action of leadership is more essential for making a difference than is the action of advocacy. We need more leaders to change the child care system in B.C., not more advocates.  And we need those leaders to come from the bottom up, or from the ranks of unpaid and under paid child workers – including parents, grandparents, preschool teachers, daycare workers, nannies and other early childhood educators.

An advocate speaks for someone, or on behalf of someone. In contrast, a leader speaks for herself by working with other people to build power and get heard.  Leaders make a difference by influencing community life. That is why leaders are the most essential thing required to create change, build organizations and sustain movements for justice, or any other set of beliefs and values, all of which goes beyond advocacy – or speaking up on behalf of others. Leaders are needed in communities because they create and sustain organizations that shape cultural and community life. Leaders are required to influence community life and for an idea or cause be acted on and become part of society.

The Vancouver Sun’s Report Card blog reports that a branch of the private Core Education and Fine Arts academic preschool has been approved to open in Vancouver. According to the preschool chain’s website, Core Education and Fine Arts offers a variety of programs and pricing levels from Platinum to Bronze for children ages 2-6.

I will be taking the holidays off and won’t be making regular postings through January 3.  I just got back from working in Baltimore with the United Workers. There I was lucky enough to get snowed in, and have over 30 cm. of snow in a day. Now I will be visiting family for the rest of the holiday season.  Happy holidays and happy new year!

Public Eye reports on criticisms of the recent B.C. section of Canada’s report on the rights of the child to the United Nations, under the Convention of the Rights of the Child reporting requirements:

Last year, a leading advocacy group warned the federal government that British Columbia had introduced legislation “weakening child labour protections.” But a recent Canadian submission to the United Nations included the regulatory change accompanying that legislation in a list of measures protecting children from economic exploitation.First Call included the warning in a July 2008 briefing requested by the federal government’s heritage department. The briefing was meant to inform that submission, which reported on Canada’s progress in meeting international child rights laws between 1998 and 2007.

“We realize the following list focus on identified shortcomings and concerns, as these were the matters that were top of mind for our partners, many of whom work with populations of vulnerable and disadvantage children and youth” wrote First Call, which represents more than 90 non-governmental organizations.

“We want to acknowledge at the outest that we understand there are many areas where Canada and individual provinces have made good progress in upholding children’s rights oh through policy and practice during the reporting period, and we fully expect these advances will be detailed in Canada’s report. read more