It’s crucial to recognize the inequities that children and their families face-in school and out. Equitable means ensuring that you consider each child’s strengths, context, and needs and provide all children with the opportunities that will support them in reaching their potential. Equal would mean giving all children the same activities, materials, and books. Every child in your group has different needs, skills, interests, and abilities. The difference between equitable and equalĮqual is not the same as equitable. As NAEYC’s equity position statement puts it, “Children’s learning is facilitated when teaching practices, curricula, and learning environments build on children’s strengths and are developmentally, culturally, and linguistically appropriate for each child.” ![]() It’s important to see cultural and linguistic differences as resources, not as deficits. Why not forge connections and support children’s learning by asking family members to help children use their home languages throughout the room? Why not have the children create their own posters with their own artwork, things from home, and photos families can supply?Īre labels (and other child-focused texts) repeated in each child’s home language, or are they in English only? Helping children to see themselves in your pedagogy, curriculum, environment, and materials enables them (and their families) to feel welcomed and valued.ĭoes the artwork on the walls accurately reflect the children’s lives, or are the walls covered with store-bought, stereotypical images? ![]() To appreciate what each child can contribute to the class, teachers need to learn about each family’s cultural values. In short, color and culture enrich classrooms. At the same time, color and culture help children learn about each other and the world. Color and culture make each one of us special and enable us to offer unique gifts and opportunities to groups we are part of. We know now that acknowledgments of color and culture are essential for legitimizing differences. Worse, it may lead to unintentional bias toward or disrespect for those who are different from us. But research has shown that this artificial blindness keeps us from recognizing, acknowledging, and appreciating important differences. Many people, including educators, have long believed it is better to act colorblind and/or “cultureblind”-that is, to not acknowledge color or culture. If the classroom doesn’t reflect and validate their families and cultures, children may feel invisible, unimportant, incompetent, and ashamed of who they are. To form positive self-concepts, children must honor and respect their own families and cultures and have others honor and respect these key facets of their identities too. And they begin to develop their self-concept (at least in part) from how others see them. One major takeaway from the position statement is that early childhood educators must support consistently warm and caring relationships between families and their children, respect families’ languages and cultures, and incorporate those languages and cultures into the curriculum, their teaching practices, and the learning environment.Ĭhildren bring their own set of culturally based expectations, skills, talents, abilities, and values with them into the classroom. Understanding that “families are the primary context for children’s development and learning” Recognizing that “self-awareness, humility, respect, and a willingness to learn are key to becoming a teacher who equitably and effectively supports all children and families”ĭeveloping a strong understanding of culture and diversity These ideas lie at the heart of NAEYC’s position statement Advancing Equity in Early Childhood Education. How did your family’s expectations affect what you did? Were your parents, siblings, and other relatives close or distant? Were they strict, lenient, or somewhere in between? Were your school’s expectations any different? All of this, and more, plays a part in how you view the behavior of the children you teach. Only then can you give every child a fair chance to succeed. ![]() In this way, culture creates diversity.įor teachers, it is essential to see and understand your own culture in order to see and understand how the cultures of children and their families influence children’s behavior. But because culture is absorbed and passed down from generation to generation rather than explicitly taught, we’re seldom aware of it.Ĭulture shapes not only our values and beliefs, but also our gender roles, family structures, languages, dress, food, etiquette, approaches to disabilities, child-rearing practices, and even our expectations for children’s behavior. Everything we think, say, and do is processed through our own cultural backgrounds.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |