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| Yuki Takahashi Braybrook
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This month meet Yuki Takahashi Braybrook, winner of the Early Childhood Educator of the Year award in the 2016 Australian Family Early Education and Care Awards.
What is your full name?
My name is Yuki Takahashi Braybrook and I am 31 years old. Takahashi comes from my Japanese heritage and I am really proud of carrying two surnames in Australia.
Which service do you work in? How many staff and children are in your service?
I am an early childhood teacher and educational leader at Devonshire Street Children's Centre at Chatswood NSW. It is located in one of the busy suburbs of Sydney. Devonshire Street has 59 children from 0-5 years old in a day and we have around 100 families. We have larger number of families who are originally from Asian countries thus, when walking on the street, we hear people speak in Mandarin, Cantonese, Korean and also Japanese. We really need to walk along the side of others together on the mutual journey.
For our teaching team, we have 14 educators, Nominated Supervisor as well as a Chef. Many of our educators are currently upgrading their qualifications from studying a Diploma to Masters.
What is your professional background and career experience?
My professional journey as an early childhood educator commenced in a very small occasional centre in 2009 as an untrained educator. I gradually upgraded my qualification through completing a Diploma to a Bachelor of Early Childhood in 2010. Although I am originally from overseas, I did not obtain any qualification other than my HSC. Thus, I guess I was always craving for knowledge and learning opportunities. Speaking of which, I have recently completed a Certificate IV in Training and Assessment and I am currently committed to completing a Masters of Educational Leadership specialised in Early Childhood at Macquarie University. For most of my teaching, I have been working in council operated services as a Team Leader as well as Educational Leader, leading pedagogical curriculum of the service as well as my own room. I am actively re-visiting my home country to re-discover and develop an educational connection between Australia and Japan to share cultural knowledge and experience to other practitioners and students.
What attracted you to a career in the early childhood sector?
Neuroscience studies conducted in Australia (Winter, 2010) reveals that by the time the child is 3 years old, 90% of the brain has been developed. It is so critical to acknowledge the early years period in human life by providing intentional care and education and also developing a warm and trusting relationship. In an old Japanese saying: 'what is learned in the cradles is carried to the grave.'
I always feel responsible for raising the next generation who lead tomorrow's society after we die. What other career would be better than working and walking beside these children?
What does a 'normal' day look like for you?
I am sure many would agree with me that there is no such thing as a 'normal day', as an early childhood teacher working with young children. But the first thing I do at work is to greet children and families on arrival. This can be quite important as they can always bring something new to our daily curriculum. Listening is crucial part of pedagogical practice as educators. Our team has a morning meeting to pass on any information so everyone is on board. My team reflects on our curriculum every afternoon to amend any changes or intentionally plan for the next day. I also have regular meetings with families and other educators in the service.
What makes your service unique?
Every service should be unique and an important thing for all of us to remember is that you cannot just copy from others' practices and policies and paste on your service. As we have a large number of families who have migrated from overseas, we always learn and discover diverse cultural knowledge and sociocultural perspectives from each other. We identified the need for children to become more independent through working with families and understanding their cultural expectations and practices at home. We embarked on a project to change our routines, curriculum and view of childhood with the families. It is an ongoing process but our communication has become a lot more open and we have developed wonderful relationships with families.
We also have been developing a connection to local community. Everything that the children engage or learn, my team try our best to connect with community resources. We go everywhere. Library, shopping centre, café, train station, oval, park, police station, parents' workplace and other early childhood services around us. Having many helpers, our class goes on an excursion once a week. Being seen by the community, the children are more visible and keep their strong position in the community and society.
What are some of the advantages of working in early childhood education and care?
Working with young children, families and other educators and leaders has not only shaped my identity as an educator but also as a committed citizen of the country.
This may be personal but I feel working in a number of my previous services gave me a sense of belonging to the community especially the times when I was still new to this country and I am so grateful for it.
What are some of the biggest challenges facing the sector?
Early childhood practitioners and leaders are facing complex issues in leading quality education and care. We have multilayered responsibilities in everyday duties in such an isolated work environment. We have limited career progression and leadership growth as our sector is perceived as a strategy to increase women's work participation.
What we really need for leaders and practitioners is to establish a professional learning community where these leaders can share knowledge with other educators, families and the community and nurture others' capabilities as future educational leaders (Fleming, 2015). We also need to develop an attractive leadership specialisation so leaders can take up specialised areas of expertise to support the whole sector (Waniganayake, Cheeseman, Fenech, Hadley & Shepherd, 2012).
How has your service changed to deal with these challenges?
It is still an evolving process however, my service has started adapting a distributed leadership model where individual experience and expertise are used at multiple levels of the organisation. For example, we have Educational Leader, Outdoor Pedagogy Leader, First Aid Officer and some others also take specific roles in the service to create a rich and democratic workplace. This has impacted educators to contribute their knowledge and positive work culture.
We are also starting to further develop a connection with other services to expand our professional knowledge and network. Our current discussion was to seek a partnership with another service in a rural NSW to share indigenous cultural knowledge. We look forward to growing this indigenous partnership concept.
How does the early childhood industry need to change to adapt to these challenges?
Although our fragmentation between mixed-market, private, non-private, infants and preschoolers in our sector began to merge, we should take an active approach to develop a learning community with other services and professionals by networking and sharing knowledge and embracing each other's experiences. I like Urban's concept of "critical ecology of the profession (2008, p. 150)" where all committed leaders work towards shared professional goals by developing visions and goals for children's rights, overcoming workforce issues beyond individual organisations and our horizon. It is the time to engage in a local and global context through working intensively with the wider community.
To overcome a number of issues in our sector, it is important for all of us to become knowledgeable through deconstructing and re-defining the concepts such as curriculum, pedagogy, intentional teaching and child- centered play. Stephen Hawking is one of my inspirations and he says, "the greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge (n.p)." Who decides what children should learn? Is it a part of intentional teaching to implement a dinosaur project after seeing a child pretending to be a dinosaur? Whose voice is heard in the curriculum? Who decides what children need to learn? We all need to become critical to reflect on these hidden truthes and re-define them.
What advice would you offer someone thinking about a career or looking for a promotion in early childhood education and care?
I need to be honest in answering this question. Working in the Early Childhood Education and Care sector is not for people who think it is easy to work with young children. Because our journey is rather rough and tough our pedagogical practice is embedded in current political discourse and priority. However, the return from your children and families and other practitioners are priceless.
If you are looking for a promotion, then congratulations on your new journey. I encourage you to keep developing your professional network with other services, mentors and local organisations.
Thanks so much for taking your time to read my article. I must say that I could not have kept walking on my teaching journey without my mentors and family. Having a mentor or leader whom you can lean on or inspire your pedagogical practice is so crucial in your long term career commitment. Mentoring enables the workforce and individual to grow and sustain as professionals. I hope you have someone who you can trust and lean on when you need to talk someone. Invest your expertise and make your commitment visible through self-development. The sky is the limit.
You also need to embrace your family and friends and yourself. Have a good balance with your life and work. Have some time off from work and study sometime and find something you like other than teaching. It sounds so common but it is so true. Your wellbeing significantly influences your teaching. If you are happy in yourself then you can really empower children and other educators in your workplace.
2016 Australian Family Early Education and Care Awards.
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