The guiding question for this course was: "What is essential in child and youth development?" There are many different answers to this, and they all go hand in hand with each other. First, it is important to recognize that people come in all different shapes, sizes, backgrounds, and experiences. Therefore, different youth will need different essentials in order to blossom into functional members of society. We talked about this throughout the semester when it comes to different minorities and how they face challenges that someone else who isn't a part of that minority may not have ever faced. Each of us had to pick a different minority to focus on, and I chose deafness. Someone who is deaf is going to need different things from someone who is not deaf in order to succeed such as an interpreter, a cochlear implant, and other special accommodations. It can be much easier for a hearing person to be able to grow up in society for those reasons.
We also talked a lot about the ecology of different people and how everyone has a different ecological system. These are things like the microsystem, mesosystem, exosystem, and macrosystem. These are crucial to a child's development because it shows how our environments affect us. As well as how things that don't necessarily have to do with us can still change our lives in some way. In one story called "Getting there Zambia: 1987" we can see a girls macrosystem. This is her family's culture, beliefs etc. It is in their culture that even though this girl is of school age she smokes with her dad and drinks with her mom sometimes.
It is essential to take into account what a child has gone through when determining what they need. It is also important to listen to them because they will also voice those needs. But it is our job as teachers to connect with our students to be able to see what they need from us.