Hi everyone! My name is Zoe (she/her/hers) and I'm taking this course because my background is in education so I anticipate building off of that in my social work career to some extent and want to be prepared with best practices. I'm not sure I want to work directly with young children at this point but I enjoy working with parents and learning about interventions that consider the child from a person-in-environment perspective so that treatment addresses the whole family system as well as other environmental factors that impact the child. As someone who's primarily interested in attachment and psychodynamic theories, I think it's impossible to fully address the needs of a child without considering how so much around them impacts them.
I received by undergraduate degree from Temple in Early Childhood Education, taught fourth grade in a public school in Strawberry Mansion for a couple years, and then started shifting my focus more towards mental health of children when I left teaching and accepted a job as a mental health worker/behavioral health technician at Child Guidance Resource Centers. I also worked at a preschool briefly in between, where I spent most of my time in the infant classrooms with babies who were six weeks to one year old. I also have several years of prior experience with children as an after school program co-director in North Philly, a camp counselor at the Franklin Institute and other day camps, nannying, and so forth. Additionally, I've been helping to raise my partner's daughter for the last two years, beginning when she was 2.
My field placement last year was in the behavioral health department at People's Emergency Center and my placement this year will be at Penn Psychiatry so again, I won't be working with children directly this year but I still think this knowledge is extremely helpful in terms of understanding development/attachment/etc. and for working with adults who regularly interact with children. However, I'm open to working directly with children or adolescence in the future. Looking forward to being in class with you all.