After having repeated this spiel countless times, mostly because I couldn’t pronounce ‘three’ right, I could probably\u00a0tell you about E3 Talent Design Lab in my sleep. A non-profit organisation focused on providing quality early childhood education (ECE) as well as professional development services, E3’s office sits in a tall building almost in the heart of downtown Detroit. The organisation boasts an army of highly-qualified individuals whom make up the bulk of Detroit’s ECE top dogs. Their main objective is a large-scale projection of my heart’s timid dream – to provide every child with a quality learning experience.<\/p>\n
Arts For Learning’s Sake is a project that Ayat and I are spearheading. In short, it’s a project aimed at children ages 0-5 – and in case you’re wondering, age 0 IS a thing. The project seeks to provide not just these young learners with educationally relevant and fun art experiences, but also to package the bountiful research data backing the importance of art to a child’s holistic development in such a way that it would be accessible to parents, educators and caregivers of Detroit.<\/p>\n
This project is pretty much a consolidation of everything I’m passionate about : little humans (translation : kids) , art, education, and research, but there are moments during which I stop and wonder if they hadn’t chosen the wrong person for the job. The implications of what we are planning for are tremendous, and the mere thought of failure makes me want to shut my laptop down and retreat into apathy. But that’s where perspective kicks in, albeit usually after a whole thermos of coffee, and I am reminded that I am not doing this for myself, and in a field such as ECE, I must be doing this\u00a0for the children. Coming up with new ideas while sitting in an office of giants in this field is daunting to say the least, and often I feel like a chicken on stilts amongst flamingoes. (If you’re wondering why I couldn’t have come up with a better analogy, you obviously haven’t seen that meme before, and you probably should).<\/p>\n
Would I trade this for anything in the world though? Heck no.<\/p>\n
I wouldn’t trade in the twenty minutes of waiting for a QLine that make my commuting buddies and I question its existence, because waiting for the QLine makes me aware that I actually HAVE commuting buddies. I wouldn’t trade in the malfunctioning hot water pump in UTowers, because my fellow commiserators remind me that I have more than one place in this whole building to go ‘home’ to. Neither would I trade in the construction soundtrack blaring through the office windows, because the noises remind me that I am in the middle of a city that is rebuilding itself, a city that hustles, and I am overwhelmingly lucky to be a part of it.<\/p>\n
(unless the hustle consists of a right left right right left in which case\u00a0I am just overwhelmingly uncoordinated and pose a physical danger to anyone who is a part of it) – DCBRP 2017 Inside Jokes pt 1.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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