Start with a Response to My own Childhood

My name is Xixi(熙熙). I come from a small village in Sichuan Province, China. I grew up with my granny (my mother’s mother) because my parents divorced when I was very young, so I have never met my father. In early-2000s China, many young couples in the countryside had to leave home to work in order to earn cash, because the land could only produce agricultural commodities and rarely generated income. As a result, their children were left in their hometowns to be raised by grandparents. Children in this particular social context are called “left-behind children”. Most of my classmates at that time were “left-behind children”, and nobody thought there was anything wrong with this phenomenon.

This is how I went through compulsory education, until I entered a university far from my hometown. For my undergraduate degree I studied early childhood education for a very simple reason: I wanted to figure out one question: what kind of childhood is the best childhood that human beings deserve? I gave no thought at all to practical matters such as future career development. Later, through my undergraduate studies, I did gain a broader understanding of the developmental potential of a high-quality childhood, but not a deep or concrete one, because education, as a social science, somehow can’t give you the more certain feeling that neuroscience or other sciences do. Much of the time I felt I was only learning the discussion of one viewpoint after another, rather than approaching some kind of fact, as science does.

Studying from the West

I also gradually realized that most of what I had learned came from the western acdemia, which made me choose to study this field at the the most prestigious educational institution—IOE. In September 2022, I arrived London, before that, I had never really used English in real social context, and I had never been abroad. I had only used English to do reading-comprehension questions and pick the correct answers. So I started this year of master's study almost terrified, yet also expecting a refreshing experience. Over that year, which cost roughly £50,000 (tuition, accommodation, and living expenses), I learned only three things:

  • First, there’s always another possibility in the world, and the word called “alternative”, so there is never any need to feel despair or complacency about any situation; there is nothing you must have, and the world is more forgiving than we imagine. 

  • Second, the essence of the academic world is “critical thinking”.

  • Third, the essence of innovation is “recombination”. 

Since I figured out these three principles, I became much more confident in intellectual practice. In addition, because I studied at UCL, I can use library resources for £50 a year as an alumni. These are all the supports I have received from the western higher education institution. It sounds thin, but it fundamentally changed the way I perceive the world. In September 2023, I graduated from my master’s degree with Distinction, which put a perfect full stop on the training of academic literacy. 

Working in London’s Nursery

After graduating, I had to pay my own rent, and I needed to find a job that offered a work visa in order to stay in London, so I immediately started working at a very small nursery in London. Three months later, I obtained a work visa and moved to the nursery where I now work. But working in London hasn’t answered the deepest question in my heart: what kind of childhood do we want to give our next generation and why? This feeling has become even more complicated with the rapid development of AI. I sense that the world is undergoing some kind of change, but when facing the young lives I encounter every day, we know nothing about this change. No one bothers to respond to the situation or seek change.

Within this industry, there is always equivocation coming from the market agents or authority’s bureaucrats. For instance, people try to convince that we should develop children’s mathematical ability, but through one to one conversation, I discovered that people rarely understand what developing children’s mathematical ability actually means. They can tell you which key abilities to develop, but lack a systematic understanding of this discipline and any real imagination of how it applies in the real world; everything seems just a form of rhetoric on the surface.

And with AI acting as a catalyst, I have a kind of profesional identity crisis: in an era like this, people like me who hold liberal arts degrees seem, to some extent, are “illiterate”.

What’s next?

So I want to begin by changing my own practice and making some effort for this field. I want to find out how early childhood educators can find their place in the age of AI, how to deconstruct some structural problems from within, and how to keep changing the existing narrative frameworks of education through a multidisciplinary perspective. More importantly, I want to use my own practice as material to explore how an individual can cross differences in education and cultural background and what this crossing itself actually means.

Finally, I want to say that from a distance this world looks as expressionless as a concrete wall. You do not know what to do to ease the somewhat awkward or cold relationship between you and the world. But if we choose to see something and choose to speak out our thoughts, you will discover that the world is nothing but a web woven from one vivid life story after another, a web we share, a web full of infinite possibilities. I choose to weave my life into this great web, in a way that I want and enjoy.

Thank you for seeing my story. I know you also have your own story waiting for me to see.