-
- QUESTION
Contents page:
The importance of issues of global leadership and sustainable futures............
Context for the project......................................................................................
Challenges..........................................................................................................
Preliminary outcomes of the project.................................................................
Future possibilities.............................................................................................
References.........................................................................................................
Some suggestions for each section:-
Brief critical reflection:
In this section, discuss the importance of issues of global leadership and sustainable futures. I would recommend you dedicate at least one paragraph to the introduction of your assignment in which you include a broad discussion of what sustainability is and why it is important. Remember that there are many aspects to the concept of sustainability - environmental, social, economic and political. The readings referred to in Module 1 are helpful for developing your discussion in this section.
You could go on to develop a discussion framed around why sustainability is important for young children, why early childhood is an ideal time to have these discussions and how these issues might be relevant for early childhood educators and their practices.
Context for the project:
In this section describe your workplace context – briefly, describe your service and the community in which your service operates. Discuss the impetus for your project- include a discussion of the conditions for change – that is, any conditions/events that have led to developing the project. For instance, Area 3 of the National Quality Standards (NQS) focuses on caring for the physical environment. The project could be developed to demonstrate how your service supports environmental sustainability (e.g. re-cycling, re-using materials/equipment, reducing waste, and using natural, re-cycled and found materials). Draw on the literature to support how pedagogical leadership involves professional conversations and engaging children and families in the development of the project – these are just a few ideas here. Then, outline the project.
Outline of the project
In this section describe the project.
Challenges:
In this section identify any barriers you encountered along the way and how you managed them. Some possible examples of barriers may include:
- Staff reluctance to engage in the project – possibly due to limited knowledge or little interest in issues of sustainability
- Financial considerations
- Practical issues associated with implementing the project
Preliminary outcomes of the project:
In this section outline how the project is progressing – what aspects of the project have been implemented to date. Remember, the project is likely to be ongoing. This section can be represented as a diagram if needed and can include a discussion of any mini projects that may have resulted from the project. Perhaps there have been other outcomes from the project, such as new or renewed interest in ideas that spring from the project (e.g. renewed interest in re-cycling, re-using materials/equipment, reducing waste, using natural re-cycled and found materials or thinking about how to embed long-term sustainable practices at your service) by staff or children. Perhaps you’ve noticed some changes in the way staff or children think about issues of sustainability – again these are just a few guiding suggestions here.
Future possibilities:
In this section reflect and evaluate the project to date. Your evaluations may include long-term goals that have been set at your service for implementing sustainable practices that can be embedded in service operations – again these are just suggestions here and you may have other ideas here.
Reference list
Use a separate page and follow the referencing guidelines as stated in the Subject Outline.
Appendix
Include a copy of the discussion posts 1 & 2.
Please be aware this example is a guide and while it can be drawn upon as a basis for your assignment you are not required to follow this example.
| Subject | Administration | Pages | 10 | Style | APA |
|---|
Answer
Organisational Change in the Workplace Project
The Importance of Issues of Global Leadership and Sustainable Futures
What is sustainability? There are numerous definitions of what is sustainability with each supporting diverse unique concepts and principles. It can be defined as set of behaviour and practices that support goals that are driven towards attaining and maintain harmony together with diversity of the particular aim (Berthelsen, Brownlee, & Johansson, 2009). Sustainability is an important aspect since everything that we do today through actions and choices has dire impacts on the future. Therefore, it gives insights in to the characteristics of the human world.
According to, Farrell, (2005) there are three pillars of sustainability namely; economic development, social development, and the environmental protection. Economic development is an aspect that remains utterly important since it is a burning issue in our society that proves to cause most havoc, since it is based on political ideology. It encourages businesses, organizations and individuals to enhance sustainability guidelines in order to improve economic sustainability in the world. Social development is more of maintaining access more so the fundamental resources, and enhance that quality of life is not interfered with. For instance, how can we achieve sustainable housing for all and at the same time manage to achieve the objective using environmental friendly sustainable materials? The other element of social development and the most important of all is education. Education for all is achievable for all, if we started embracing Early Childhood Education and Care, not only at the national levels, but at the international stage as well (Brownlee, Nailon, & Tickle, 2010). The last pillar of sustainability is environmental protection that can occur through reducing or re-using the resources that we use in the world. This is the primary and essential concern associated with the future of humanity. For future sustainability, it is important to study, understand, and eventually protect the ecosystem we live in. therefore, sustainability is an essential aspect not only in the future of humanity, but also in our day-to-day life activities. Therefore, for achievement of sustainability, effective leadership together with education ought to play crucial roles.
Sustainability of education has an important character to play and enhance in the modification of the leadership paradigm in association with fostering leaders, who have the required abilities of working together in harmony to address achievement of complex sustainability challenges. This means that sustainable leadership has a mandate of tacking the right action based on the values connected with sustainability, as they lead the way from an active process paradigm, and at the same time create a reflective leadership process. For leaders, there are numerous pedagogical set of practices that are associated with fostering development and some of them include; reflection, individual awareness, observation abilities, ecological exploration, unique diverse perspectives among many others. In order to achieve sustainability in the world, we need to come up with suitable solutions that address the problems facing humanity globally, and try to restore the sense of humans in general. For instance, social inequality and climate change are some of the complicated sustainability issues that humans need to address (Farrell, 2005). However, addressing the sustainability problems does not come without a price since it involves interrelated issues, uncertainty over a possible solution, and stakeholders conflict, showing there is urgent requirement for interdisciplinary practices that are aimed towards achieving sustainability.
This shows why educational institutions are at a high rate trying to address the initial challenge of coming up with programs that foster and nurture leaders for sustainability purposes, and who are ready to work under this context and sustainability initiative. Sustainability education is trying to reflect and impart knowledge to assist learners in identifying unsustainable systems, ways of solving problems creatively, and managing to address any issue that arises from ecological, social, political, and economic challenges. Sustainability education normally prepares learners with adequate skills, personal attitudes, together with values that are relatively essential towards transition f a sustainable society in the future. This fete can be achieved at the global stage, if Early Childhood Education and Care was to address sustainability problems from this stage (Brownlee, Nailon, & Tickle, 2010). Therefore, children will manage to effectively the problems and the best solutions to the challenges facing sustainability regardless of the problem intensity.
To come up with the most sustainable results from Early Childhood Education and Care, then we have to foster excellent leadership skills. This is mainly because the Early Childhood Education and Care has emerged and proved to be an important tool, in the last decade, which can be used in achieving the sustainable development in the world. It has shown that sustainable world will need shift not only in awareness, but also in values and practices more so to modify our current patterns of unsustainable production and consumption mechanism. There is reluctant behaviour among the leaders as they are slow to address the best practices that are necessary to solve the unsustainable issues affecting the universe (Farrell, 2005). However, future sustainability is key and dependent on Early Childhood Education and Care as a driver not only for childhood education, but also for also future prospects.
Context for the Project
The context for this project is Early Childhood Education and Care in Aotearoa in New Zealand. In New Zealand, the Council of Teachers has a mandate of offering professional leadership that come in association with programme of diverse projects with main aim as improving teaching for better sustainability of childhood education. The purpose of this project is to show how Early Childhood Education and Care in New Zealand is trying to incorporate sustainable development skills in childhood education, together with excellent leadership aspects, as they are vital for the achievement of sustainability (Hard, Press, & Gibson, 2013). In New Zealand, ECEC is an education sector that is marked for its diversity. However, it is confronted by a number of issues that arise from not only from the historical perspectives of the ECEC, but also from the recent modifications in the political and social context associated with New Zealand. For instance, services like Play-centre mainly operate from a collaboration of ECEC provision led by parents. It ensures that no one holds a key position and therefore embraces emergent leadership.
Fostering leadership qualities among the adults together with the children involves assisting the learners to see and appreciate themselves as leaders. This is the first critical step, which comes with the abilities of enacting change in association with influencing the world positively and this makes it a transformational process. Therefore, development of leadership skills in the adults and children settings is reliant on sustainable education as it comes with shifting connective, universal, and ecological ways of learning and thinking as well. This normally focusses on the transformational method instead of the Trans missive learning procedure (Macfarlane, & Lewis, 2012). The transformational learning mechanism lays foundation to not only sustainable education, but also to fostered leadership since it shows the cultural change in the fundamental feelings and action driven towards sustainable development. It is important to note that this shift has capabilities of changing our self-understanding body awareness, personal joy, and diverse living ways, among many others.
According to, Brownlee, Nailon, & Tickle, (2010) the pedagogical approaches are crucial for development of leadership as they are dependable with the essential transformational learning entities. The following are the pedagogical approaches for children and adults as well: context awareness, experience, relationship authenticity, crucial reflection, dialogue and experience. However, the following pedagogical approaches aim to foster:
- Collaboration of leaders through community learning mechanisms that are experiential
- Sustainable mechanism of being via the reflection, observation, and self-awareness
- Living methods paradigm via both diverse and ecological perspectives inclusion
The overall aim of this project was to enhance and create awareness of the Early Childhood Education and Care in New Zealand, more so among the education stakeholders, parents, young children, and the ECEC in general. Besides that, it was of importance that the project had to enhance much focus more so on the child-oriented perspectives (Macfarlane, & Lewis, 2012). Moreover, the imperative idea behind the project was to not only invite, but also introduce the children together with education professionals to discuss and analyse the ECEC in New Zealand with much focus on the ideas of the children.
Challenges facing ECEC
- Low leadership profile
The lack of research in New Zealand that focuses on the ECEC has laid down a contrast more so to the profusion of literature associated with leadership in early childhood education and care. The lack of giving attention and focusing in ECEC despite the possible potential shows that fostered leadership is not being enhanced in schools. The reason why research is not being conducted is mainly because the professionals are reluctant and slow to engage with the leadership perception in the field, together with unwillingness to connect mainly with leadership models not only form the school environments, but also from beyond. Besides that, leadership is a huge enigma issue for many teachers in early childhood (Hard, Press, & Gibson, 2013). Other factor for low leadership profile has been unawareness among many teachers in the New Zealand.
- Less experienced, newly qualified teachers assuming on the leadership positions
The newly qualified teachers come with less experience on the Early Childhood Education and Care and they are assigned leadership tasks and positions with immediate effect. In most cases, they are under pressure to take up those positions because of their qualified status. They end up playing conflicting responsibilities and roles, and this limits the time spent collectively when working on the young children (Macfarlane, & Lewis, 2012). This means that the practice is in certain ways of repelling and obstructing teachers from the leadership roles and responsibilities, instead of fostering these leadership roles.
- Lack of leadership developing ECEC programmes
It is important to note that recognition of crucial roles in development of leadership in early childhood education, together with associated literature and research normally conflicts and contrasts with inadequate practices and research connected to development of leadership in ECEC. This has contributed largely to the low and poor profile leadership in ECEC since there are no mechanisms that show support for professional development and leadership training (Berthelsen, Brownlee, & Johansson, 2009). This denies the children a chance to develop their leadership skills that would be vital not only in their lives, but also in enhancing future sustainability prospects. Therefore, more time and resources need to be averted to developing the skills of teachers professionally, as they can be mentor to the children under ECEC.
Preliminary outcomes of the project
- Adults have a tendency of underestimating knowledge of children
Adults have been underestimating for many decades substantial knowledge exhibited by children. During the project, children showed that they had ideas and thoughts that were connected to achieving a sustainability. However, until to the implementation of this project, I came to learn that Early Childhood Education and Care children did not have awareness in connection to the ecology, and environmental protection mainly linked to the ECEC and sustainability issues (Berthelsen, Brownlee, & Johansson, 2009).
- Children show competencies and knowledge
During the project, it emerged that children were competent in their work and the fact that they exhibited high levels of knowledge. For instance, when their teachers asked them questions, they managed to comment and answer willingly more so on people, actions and people in diverse mechanisms (Brownlee, Nailon, & Tickle, 2010). Therefore, they managed to register diverse things in their environment.
Future Possibilities
The Early Childhood Education and Care need to come up with mechanisms that will involve children in the drive towards a sustainable universe. They have the right to be involved as well in issues that affect their lives, not only now, but also in the future as well. The future possibility is that education for sustainability will be the main driver that will be the best for Early Childhood Education and Care. Another possibility is that teachers will have to undergo leadership refresher courses that will impart them with necessary skills, knowledge and experience of best practices (Hard, Press, & Gibson, 2013). In turn, they will manage to transfer this to the ECEC children for better foster leadership and sustainability in the universe.
References
|
Berthelsen, D., Brownlee, J., & Johansson, E. (Ed.). (2009). Participatory learning in the early years: Research and pedagogy. New York: Routledge. Brownlee, J., Nailon, D., & Tickle, E. (2010). Constructing leadership in child care: Epistemological beliefs and transformational leadership. Australasian Journal of Early Childhood, 35(3), 95-104. Farrell, A. (2005). Globalising early childhood teacher education. International Journal of Early Childhood, 37(1), 9-17. Hard, L., Press, F., & Gibson, M. (2013). 'Doing' Social Justice in Early Childhood: the potential of leadership. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 14(4), 324-334. Macfarlane, K., & Lewis, P. (2012). United we stand: Seeking cohesive action in early childhood education and care. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 13(1), 63-73. |