Heads up: This post is 12 years old. My thinking may have evolved since then — read it with that in mind.
Last Friday, we met up with my good friend and mentor in Early Childhood Education, Sarah Vincent, to interview her about her experience with Hong Kong parents.
Sarah has been teaching for 12 years, 8 of those being in international kindergartens in Shanghai and Hong Kong. Inspired by the Reggio Emilia Approach during her second year in shanghai, she began to adopt the philosophy of social constructivism, gradually learned to let children take the lead. More recently, the RIE (Resources for Infant Educarers) Approach has profoundly influenced her relationships in the classroom. She is set to receive more training from the RIE Foundations in Auckland New Zealand in March.
In our expert interviews, we’ve identified 3 objectives to learn about:
Parents’ knowledge of Early Childhood Education
Parents’ decision making process
Parents’ source of information
There were multiple questions within each of these objectives. Sarah’s answers to these questions brought us new perspectives through a foreigner teacher’s glasses. She was very good at jumping ahead and giving us the answer to a better question that we should be asking. (This is one of the reasons why we chose to interview experts first, their in depth knowledge can help us horn in on the real issues and the real questions!)
So what have we learned? One thing that I thought was very important was transparencies. Parents have no rights over their children in the schools. We have no access behind closed doors. Schools hold all the power in this relationship, they can do whatever they want and the parents just have to take it. This is not a healthy relationship. Parents and schools should be a 2-way dialog. (We stepped above and beyond understanding parents and talked about schools and systemic issues. It’s certainly a big issue to tackle.)