Advocacy

Advocacy is a vital component of the early childhood professional’s role. Advocacy can occur on a daily basis through supportive interactions with children and their families and connecting families to needed resources. At a broader and more public level, advocacy can occur when a specific message is developed and disseminated with the goal of positively impacting the lives of children, families, early childhood professionals, and the field as a whole

Assignments 1–3: Information Dissemination: Child Development and Learning

Developing effective advocacy messages requires deep knowledge of a particular topic, an effective means of delivering the message, and the ability to design a research-based message that can serve to motivate others to your cause. Over the next 5 weeks, you will design three advocacy pieces. Each advocacy piece will use a different format—a webinar, a podcast, and a white paper. Each advocacy message must be on a different topic and related to nurturing young children.

To prepare:

Select from the following topics, or choose another topic or topics of great interest to you:

Attachment
Empathy
Self-regulation
The role of play in social-emotional development
Family cultures
Resilience
Risk factors

Note: If you have selected a topic or topics not on the list above, get approval from your Instructor before proceeding.

Across each of these topics, the information you develop needs to be responsive to the following:

Audience:For whom is this information being developed? (Families, early childhood coaches, policy makers, educators, etc.)
Role:Whom are you speaking as? Please select a role that provides your voice for each piece that is meaningful to you (educator, family advocate, administrator, coach, policy maker, researcher).
Goal:What do you hope to gain by sharing this information? What impact do you want to have on your target audience?

Note: For each of the advocacy messages you develop, cite appropriate references in APA format to substantiate your thinking. For each, you are required to include current research and evidence, using at least two scholarly resources from the course and two additional scholarly resources that you have selected from the Walden Library. Be sure that each of the resources you select is peer reviewed and less than 5 years old.

The formats for your advocacy messages are as follows:

Note: Exemplars for each of these required formats are provided within the Module 3 Optional Resources. As you develop your Assignments, please visit the Discussion space for the Optional Discussion: Community of Practice to ask questions, share resources, and collaborate with your colleagues.

Format: Webinar (PowerPoint with Audio). Your slideshow should be 15–18 slides in length with audio narration clearly presenting your advocacy message with a research-based foundation on the topic of your choice.

RESOURCES

Music, G. (2017). Nurturing natures: Attachment and children’s emotional, sociocultural, and brain development (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Psychology Press.

Chapter 5, “Empathy, Self, and Other Minds”
Chapter 6, “Attachment”
Chapter 7, “The Importance of Culture”
Chapter 8, “Biology and the Brain”
Chapter 10, “Language, Words, and Symbols”
Chapter 11, “Memories: Learning Who We Are and What to Expect”
Chapter 12, “Play: Fun, Symbolising, Practising, and Mucking About”
Chapter 13, “Boys, Girls, and Gender” (pp. 135–147)
Chapter 14, “Nonmaternal Care and Childcare” (pp. 151–160)
Chapter 15, “Middle Childhood, Siblings, Peers and Group Life”
Chapter 16, “The Place of Fathers” (pp. 173–183)
Chapter 18, “Trauma, Neglect, and Their Effects” (pp. 201–210)
Chapter 19, “Resilience and Good Feelings” (pp. 211–223)
Chapter 9, “Epigenetics, Evolution and How Nature Meets Nurture”
Chapter 21, “Conclusion: Earlier Experience and Its Longer-Term Consequences” (pp. 233–241)Note:These readings support individual topics selected for Assignments 1–4

https://ezp.waldenulibrary.org/login?url=https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=mnh&AN=22251288&scope=site

Complete Answer: