Heads up: This post is 12 years old. My thinking may have evolved since then — read it with that in mind.
After encountering the difficulties of parent interviews and learning of Narayan’s strategy to interview experts first, we laid out the experts we know with our networks and started contacting them
We start our expert interviews off with Jeffrey Ip, professor of early childhood education at Baptist University and co-founder of Design for Change Hong Kong, and Allison Lee, my partner at The Mulberry Tree Progressive Unschool.
Jeffrey is a father of three, he grew up in Hong Kong but went to Australia when he was in 2nd grade and lived there for a few years, hence he could see the huge difference in the education system between Hong Kong and Australia at an early age. He has a background in developmental psychology and, as a father, became very interested in early childhood development. He now teaches a parenting course at Baptist University, based on the requests of parents wanting to learn to become better parents. He’s also the co-founder of Design for Change Hong Kong, Design for Change is a global initiative from India that challenges school children to do something about the problems that they care about. Jeffrey is passionate about the idea and brought it to Hong Kong.
Allison is a mother of one, born and bred in Hong Kong, she came upon the Montessori Method before she became a mother and felt deeply about its philosophies. She flew to South Korea to study and practice at the Montessori Korea Kindergarten for six years, and brought the Montessori Korea brand to Hong Kong. Having worked with hundreds of local parents and children over the past two years, not to mention navigating the local kindergarten system herself for her son, she has a deep understanding of what local parents are facing everyday.
Mrinalini and I spent a wonderful afternoon at The Mulberry Tree chatting with these two fine “parent experts”. It was much more fruitful than our previous attempts at interviewing parents.