Hello, and welcome to the Self-leadership in Early Childhood Education course! This 32-hour course invites in-depth self reflection, exploring themes of identity, belonging, race, equity, and ultimately social justice. We hope you are ready to engage with this course's content with curiosity and courage. There is a saying that growth happens when we step outside of our comfort zone, and this course aims to bring each participant beyond a place of certainty and toward a place we are all living, experiencing, and growing with the capacity to evolve. Within this course, you will be introduced to strategies for your own care, supporting your nervous system to regulate so that you can create conditions for learning that are optimally challenging rather than distressing. Keep in mind that this course has been created to support early childhood educators and leaders committed to lifelong learning and growth so that we can consciously participate and offer ourselves in service to the long journey towards a future of mutual flourishing. In this course, you will have opportunities to engage with the infinite depth of the question. Who am I? Examining the self is rooted in the belief that each of us brings a unique gift to the world. If we, as Early Childhood Educators and leaders are to instill children with the knowledge and awareness that each of them exists as a unique and never before seen gift, we, too, must develop that same capacity to see that in ourselves. This awareness is the anchor of this course. The course additionally focuses on situating ourselves within the systems that condition us, systems built on histories of violence and inequity. Some of this is painful, uncomfortable and can feel disparagingly grim. This course will examine some of the systems that lead to oppression and injustice, and the self reflective activities will ask questions centered around, how do these systems live in me? And how can I disrupt the internalized patterning of those systems? This course is a place to be humble. Humility is a critical disposition for all learners. At this point in history, we are all aware of injustice. Hopefully you will encounter information that you do not yet know, information that can support you in further understanding the big picture and your place in it all. This course will support early childhood educators and leaders who are committed to taking the fumbling, bumbling imperfect steps towards justice. We step in this fumbling, bumbling, imperfect way courageously, in the hopes of making the trail a little more manageable for those who come after us. This course will empower learners with the necessary language and knowledge to articulate how colonial systems are designed to promote inequity and will promote self reflection, to provoke learners to commit to tangible ways of disrupting these systems in the everyday practices of Early Childhood Educators and leaders. Throughout this course, you'll find videos, podcasts, readings, and reflective activities designed to support you in applying the content. By the end of the course, you will have gained language, resources, and inspiration to support you in advocating for justice and enacting justice within early care and learning communities. And if all goes well, you will have fertilized some space to practice loving kindness within yourself. We hope that your gifts find a place to shine in this course. We trust that you will get as much out of this course as you put into it and that all of your efforts will be in the benefit of yourself and your communities. Enjoy the journey.