Ron Blatz - Manitoba Canada

I am pleased to announce that the local Manitoba Chapter of MECE (Men in Early Childhood Education) now has a leadership team. A special thanks and welcome to Adam Manicom from Assiniboine Castle Day Care who has graciously offered to help me organize our local meetings and guide the direction of the group. If you need to connect with Adam please e-mail him at adammanicom@hotmail.com .

Last week Adam and I met for lunch and planned out our next 6 months schedule.

Here is what you have to look forward to.

February 16, 2010
We are planning an evening meeting around the theme of active, rough and tumble, riskier PLAY. The theme will be further developed in the weeks to come, but we are very excited to sponsor a meeting on this topic which we think will be of interest to everyone. Our plan is to have someone from RRC give a short talk on the topic, Terry Bussey (Discovery Centre) to share about what this looks like in the School-age environment, Adam Manicom (Assiniboine Castle) to share what this looks like in a toddler group. We are also planning to have a coordinator from MCCP in attendance to also bring this perspective to our discussion. Please put this date on the calendar and invite your friends to join us. A poster with more details will follow in early February.

Early April, 2010
We are planning to have an evening showing of the “Expect Male Involvement” video that was produced by Frances Carlson of Chattahoochee College in Georgia. It is a great DVD (about 38 minutes long) which is sure to once again stimulate a lot of interesting conversation from you the audience. Frances will be a keynote speaker at the MCCA conference in May 2010, so you may well be interested in finding out a bit more about this College teacher who has also written a book called “Essential Touch”.

May 23, 2010
We are pleased to announce that on the Thursday night of the MCCA conference we will once again be hosting a meeting of our MECE group with guest speakers, Frances Carlson and Bryan Nelson. Bryan is the president of the Menteach organization (www.menteach.org) who can get to know better by reading the November e-mail newsletter below. In my humble opinion, Bryan is the best spokesperson in the world on the topic of Men in the Teaching professions, and we are honoured to have him travel up to Manitoba to join us. Bryan is also one of the guest that Frances Carlson interviews in her video which we will be watching in April. This is a must attend session for anyone interested in exploring the topic of Men in ECE a bit further. Details will follow. We still are waiting to hear from one other guest who may be traveling up from the Southern USA to join us. If this gets confirmed we will let you know.

As always these meetings are open for women and men to attend. Here is a fantastic way to get 6 hours of PD hours in with little or no work on your part. If this e-mail is reaching you as an out of Manitoba connection, we would be pleased to see you register for the MCCA conference and consider joining our local MECE group on the Thursday night. One day we have a vision of sponsoring a National gathering of MECE, so support from other regions is always appreciated. Go to www.mccahouse.org and under Professional Development you will soon be finding out more about the upcoming conference. You might also note the proactive stance the MCCA has taken by including images of male caregivers on their home page (pictures scroll through so it all depends when you are on the site as to which picture you see).

“Men Need Women – Women Need Men – Children Need Both”
http://www.worldforumfoundation.org/wf/men/connect.php