Transcription
♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Here, can I help you with it? Good morning.
(child) Teacher, I'm done. It's gonna work now? Oh, it went up. Push it down. I love how that goes.
(Kimberly Nall) And the way that we view things is so engrained in us. Just because this is the way I do it and I was raised to do it doesn't mean that it's the only way. And teaching our teachers to recognize that in themselves is something that's important for a program to do because often times that's not something that's openly discussed is why we feel the way we feel about certain practices and behaviors.
(Christina Lopez-Morgan, MA) So I guess I'm really talking about the attitude and the expectations of the program as the beginning place, and then from there, the willingness to keep strategizing, using the dialogue that you've constructed with the family as the way to transform what you're doing in the classroom. It isn't just the teacher doing it, but it's also at the leadership and administrative levels that we're embracing, we're reaching out, we're finding the person who speaks your language and bringing them to you, so they can help you navigate the environment.
(Kimberly Nall) I would agree with that, but I also think that when we talk about leadership that we need to also look outside of what we think of generally as a leader, as whether it's a center director or an administrative. Sometimes it's a grandparent, sometimes it's an auntie, or somebody in the community, and so if we are able to help be a resource for those future leaders in early care and education and speaking about culturally-responsive approaches, I think that it's also our role to bring them in and find a way to have a community base.
(Peter Mangione, PhD) I wonder about that. I wonder if we don't tap into the kind of knowledge and learning that families naturally share with their children-- because all families are doing that, whether it's around math concepts or science concepts or literacy. Are there ways we could be better at engaging the family with the kind of learning their children naturally engage in with them and making that part of the learning experience in our early childhood settings?
(Kimberly Nall) We one time invited all of our families to go on a nature walk around our center. It was really interesting to see how families were able to relate the nature walk to their culture and the things that mattered to them in nature. We were able to hear about how they might garden because part of the walk was through our garden and the things that they grow at home and the things that they use those vegetables for in recipes at home and some of the native plants that were recognized on the walk. And so, while it was a nature walk, it ended up being an experience in culture as well because we learned more about the experiences of the children, and we learned more about the experiences in the families.
When we talk about this topic of the influence of culture on children's development, two points come out in my mind. One is the view that you get from the outside. How do others relate to your cultural identity, and what does that mean for you?
(Kimberly Nall) And the way the children feel about practices in our programs is going to influence their development and make them feel either a connection, like proud of who they are, or they may feel less proud because of the way that we're implementing our programs. And so, if we give the message that what they're doing at home is incorrect or wrong, they're forming their identity during that process, and so many hours are spent in the care of others outside of their home. We oftentimes view difference as a deficit, and a child coming up seeing themselves as different because their culture doesn't match the dominant culture can begin to pick up a notion or an idea or a consciousness that there's something wrong with them or there's something wrong with their family or there's something wrong with their community, and for some reason or another they don't measure up. And this can happen very early on just in terms of, perhaps, the way a child is held by a caregiver or the words that a child hears from a caregiver or the attitude that a child perceives a caregiver has towards their parent. So culture is-- it's very, very important because it is what we experience every day, and we wanna make sure that that experience for all of us-- but especially for young children-- is as positive and embracing and as inclusive as it could be.
We've talked a lot about culture, and diversity is also included in the fact that not all families look alike. In our diverse programs we have families with same-sex parents, and we have families with grandparents raising children, and they might talk about their birth parent, and so there's a lot of dynamics that we need to acknowledge when we talk about family. When you look across the spectrum in terms of the world, you see all different models and examples of how families grow and develop and how children and human beings grow and develop differently than the Eurocentric model, and we have to become more knowledgeable about that, more accepting about that, and more transformed, ourselves.
(Kimberly Nall) From the moment they walk in the door you're really giving them a clue to what your program is about and what is going to happen inside. And hopefully in the very beginning process, in the intake process, when we're getting to know the families, that will hopefully come out in some of the questions, the open-ended questions, that we ask families. What's important to them about caregiving practices, care routines? How do you hold your infant? Lots of communication. Written communication may be important. Certainly communication in the parent's own language, very important, interpreters when needed. And depending on the individual family, it may take time for them to feel comfortable sharing some things with you. I know that the Native American community that I work for, they may not be always comfortable sharing some of their customs and practices with our program, especially if it's a new teacher, if it's somebody new in the program. They may not have that comfort level to share information that they consider sacred in theirs, and they don't necessarily know that maybe you're even going to stay long enough, and then they've given you a piece of them that you may be taking with you. You wanna be careful you're not mining people for information, trying to dig out of them things that they don't necessarily wanna share with you. So that takes some skills to create the kind of relationship where people want to talk to you.
(Intisar Shareef, EdD) As you mentioned, the mining process, I think that's a process we start with ourselves, that we're not mining someone else's field, but we're mining our own, and having done that and using yourself as an example of how that could be beneficial for the relationship as well as the program because whenever we're talkin' about culture we're talkin' about people in relationship to other people. So I need to know who I am and have some acceptance, not just knowledge but the acceptance of who I am as a cultural being before I can begin to try to connect to someone who may have had a different experience than my own.
[speaking foreign language]
(Christina Lopez-Morgan, MA) Culture is both pervasive in everything we do as well as something we're not always conscious of. That impacts how we learn, how we view the world, how we interact with others, and how we look at and see children and understand them and their families. It also has a significant impact on how children function within our programs. So culture gives you a competency in life, how to relate to the world, how to understand emotional experience, how to get along with others. Those competencies are precious, and that child needs them to keep developing.
When children come into our program and they come in with their home language that is something that is their starting point, that's their base knowledge, and we build upon that base knowledge. One way that we sort of assess children all the time in terms of their abilities is their ability to communicate their feelings or their thoughts adequately. And I know that all children aren't necessarily encouraged to be verbal the same way. So, you know, in some families and in some communities children having a lot to say back could be considered talking back, or children asking a lot of questions could be not necessarily looked upon as something to be promoted. And many times children learn in families and in communities to express themselves nonverbally.
(Kimberly Nall) Also, in Western culture, there's such an emphasis on individual success and how you do as an individual, but that's not true of all cultures; a lot of time it's based on the group. And so, when we think about how a family may be expecting our program outcomes to look, that's going to also be very different. And so we have to help people to understand this area of professional development or knowing about something is an area for you to inhabit in the questioning mode more so than in the knowing mode. And we have to be able to ask teachers questions like, "How did you come to that conclusion?" And once you start asking others questions, you can begin to incorporate more information, and it's not comfortable for us to be in that place of disequilibrium, but it's a place where knowledge begins to emerge, and we can change our thoughts, so--
(Christina Lopez-Morgan, MA) And then our behavior. And our behavior, that's right, and our behavior.
(Christina Lopez-Morgan, MA) Having those opportunities to really step back and observe ourselves-- I know it's hard to do-- but are just so valuable in giving us the insights into our deeper issues.
(Intisar Shareef, EdD) And many children of color, I think, learn how to sometimes not say anything verbally but to say something behaviorally or physically. The more time I spend in the classroom with the children, the more I'm aware of how important it is for me to keep my eyes on their expressions of their thoughts or their feelings or their moods in a nonverbal way, and the competence is exhibited in the teacher being able to interpret those messages. For teachers to be able to have relationships and seeing children for who they are means that there also has to be within the program a structure that allows adults to build those relationships with each other and have that level of trust so that they can begin to tell the truth and can begin to confront their biases safely within the context of caring for families and children and be able to talk about it and where we take responsibility for using our observation of ourselves and of others as a basis of beginning to open up the dialogue so that we can get to the deeper issues.
- Eye.
- Eyes.
- Nose.
- Nose.
- Baba.
- Baby needs a baba.
(Christina Lopez-Martin, MA) I think the way that Julie and Louise describe it in their text is the idea of visibility and invisibility, that when a child walks into a classroom where they're reflected in the environment, they gain this sense of visibility, having things in multiple languages, having artifacts from many cultures representing the children, having photos. Bulletin boards for parents, sometimes libraries for parents. We've taken books and had families take them home and write in the book in their own language so that if someone is in the classroom they can read it in that language as well as having it in English. In infant programs, you're asking families to record music that they use at home and bring it in, record nursery rhymes and songs, trying to get people to understand what tourist curriculum is, that it's just visiting a country, not understanding how irrelevant that is to children and how much that teaches them negatively about the depth of understanding someone else and someone else's experience. Yes, if you want to celebrate a certain holiday, then it needs to be celebrated in terms of the context of what that holiday is for the family and why that's important to them and how that's valuable and what that means. And also, bringing things from home that might be meaningful, whether it's a blanket or things that are familiar like the types of foods that are served, the way that you soothe a child. That's all important in bringing culture into the program. I know at Cabrillo College every week they have a family shelf, and each family shares something about their culture on the family shelf. It can be anything. It can be recipes, it can be food, it can be flowers, it can be anything that's important to them in their culture, and that's an ongoing thing that they do throughout the year so that you're continually having this self-reflection, this reflection of who you are in the environment, and that makes a difference.
If we try to think of culturally inclusive as a systematic approach to creating effective environments for children rather than as just environment or as pieces. So I think that in a culturally-inclusive program every family is valued and honored, that families are active participants in the program, in the curriculum, and also in the assessment of the program, that the environment makes every child visible in all of the ways that we've talked about already, that teachers are actively and continually exploring cultural relevance in their classroom, and that there is ongoing and continual dialogue between program and parents, between parents and teachers, between teachers and teachers, and between teachers and children. And that all of the kinds of activities that are presented are relevant to the experiences and lives of the children they serve. So I think that it's a combination of all of those things that help to make a classroom really culturally relevant for children.
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