Thursday, February 3, 2011

The Adventure Begins...

Welcome to our blog! It's Spring 2011, and we are students at California State University, Fresno (Go, Dawgs!), enrolled in CFS 134: Multicultural Perspectives on Children and Families. Most of us are Child Development majors, and we're all juniors or seniors. Our professor is Kathie Reid (you can call her Dr., but she prefers Kathie), and so far, we think she's pretty cool. Yes, she's writing this entry....from here on out, though, we (students!) will be writing the entries. We will be sharing our thoughts and reactions to a book we're all reading together -- "The Faith Club: A Muslim, a Christian, and a Jew -- Three Women Search for Understanding."

Because all of us intend to work with children and families, one of the big goals of this course is to help us become more culturally competent. This involves not only being sensitive to an array of cultural differences and similarities, but responding to them in effective ways. Ranya Idliby, Suzanne Oliver, and Priscilla Warner wrote this book about their journey to better understand themselves and each other through their friendship. The story of their journey provides wonderful examples of the challenges and rewards in seeking cultural competence, and Kathie says we'll love it. We're going to hold her to that.

You probably noticed the creative name of our blog...we had a "blog naming contest" (for extra credit, and we REALLY like that!). There were a bunch of great entries, and Kathie had such a hard time narrowing them down, that she ended up combining two entries for our title. And the winners? Stephanie and Misti!

One of the many cool things Kathie has us do is work in small groups in class. We've named our groups, and thought we'd introduce ourselves to you with our group pictures...yes, Kathie made us do this.


The Eights are Gr8!
Paj, Brittaney, Mandy, Sarah










Cameleon
Kylie, Eriko, Jacqueline, Laura, Rosaura








7th Heaven
PK, Olga, Gloria, Sara, Jena, Evelyn










The Fab Five
Caleigh, Anastacia, Lucy, Erika, Autumn








The Fab 5 being silly...












Black and Purple
Toua, Vanessa R, Jennifer, Emily, Juan










The Despicable Minions
Jamie, Brittany, Sovanny, Misti, Kit










Diamond Girls
Ritchiel, Raynita, Vanessa C, Stephanie










The Incredibles
Regina, Ashleigh, Nicole, Kabao, Amanda







So that's us! We're looking forward to a great semester, and to reading and sharing our thoughts on this book...we hope you join us!

2 comments:

  1. I was really looking forward to reading this"The Faith Club: A Muslim, a Christian, and a Jew" . It seemed so promising. However, I need to clear something up. Judaism DOES believe in the afterlife. We call it the World to Come, and it will happen when the Messiah comes. I was upset that such incorrect information was allowed to be included in this book. I did learn a lot about Islam, which was positive, but towards the end, I felt like the book took a more political stance, rather than a spiritual or religious one. I'd love to be able to contact Priscilla and talk over Judaism issues. I don't really want to recommend this book, due to its misinformation concerning Judaism.

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  2. I really appreciate your insight on the book, and your experience with it. I think you could probably contact Priscilla, as the authors have a website, though I don't know how active it is: http://www.thefaithclub.com There is a blog there, and they also have a link for letting them know if you have started a Faith Club, so I'm assuming that, even if the three authors don't read it personally all the time, that their publisher likely passes the information along to them.

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