International Correspondents and International Programs

I was able to secure a correspondent from India; however this correspondent has not yet responded. I discovered a blog of a fourth grade teacher who teaches in an international school in Singapore and asked her to ask an early childhood educator she knew if he or she could correspond with me for this course. She found a colleague from India who agreed to do this. I sent an email to this colleague with my deadlines. So far I have received no letter. If I do before the week is over, I will share information from this letter.

Here is a link to the fourth grade teacher's blog:  http://time2wonder.wordpress.com/2013/09/19/teaching-for-understanding/  

Theresa Betancourt, a professor at Harvard, is studying two issues that are not as familiar to people in the United States. She has “been researching former child soldiers in Sierra Leone for a decade,” and she is “designing an intervention for families with “HIV-infected parents in Rwanda.” She is studying how having been a chid soldier as a child affects the mental health of these children when they become young adults, and she is studying how the mental health of these former chid soldiers affects the development of the children of these former chid soldiers. The intervention she is using with families with parents who have HIV is called Family talk. This intervention was used by William Beardslee to help families with depressed parents in the United States. Because HIV can lead to the depression of the person with HIV who sees HIV as a death sentence, this person’s depression may affect his or her children. Children also have many misconceptions about HIV. Betancourt said, “‘You’ve got a parent living with chronic illness, where there’s misunderstanding and miscommunication about it and that parent needs support to still feel empowered and to be able to care for their children’” Family Talk addresses both the misconceptions and the depression. This program could also be used with families experiencing other types of diversity anywhere in the world to help prevent children from developing depression because of the adversity and depression of their parents. Here is the link for those stories:  http://developingchild.harvard.edu/faculty_and_partners/faculty/faculty_spotlights/theresa_betancourt/  

“Un Buen Comienzo (UBC), “A Good Start,” is a collaborative project in Santiago, Chile, to improve early childhood education through teacher professional development.” Both national and global leaders in early childhood education are helping with the project. Not only does the project include professional development for its early childhood teachers, but it also includes a social/emotional and a health component. The program involves 60 schools throughout Chile and is being evaluated by random sampling throughout the 60 schools for program effectiveness. The results from this evaluation will inform future systems of early childhood education. Here is the link for that story: http://developingchild.harvard.edu/index.php/activities/global_initiative/ubc/