Cultural Diversity in Early Childhood Practice

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Cultural Diversity in Early Childhood Practice

• Dalvir Gill
• CREC
• Centre for Research in Early Childhood

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Diverse aspects of diversity

• Why respect for diversity matters
• Multiple belongings
• Multiculturalism to Cultural Negotiation
• Adults and Children engaging in Inclusive and
  Open Dialogues

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Why respect for diversity matters

• Education an emerging political theme
• Social cohesion
• Early Childhood Education matters, (OECD) but not
  all early education matters in the same way
• Quality matters
• Respect for diversity matters

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• To help close the gap in the achievement of
  all children and families
• To identify and explore the diversity of the
  most excluded populations and how to tune
  into their needs more effectively
• To examine values and practice and to enhance
  understandings of diversity and equality issues
  in society in order to address inequalities
• To critically reflect on a wide range of
  perspectives
• To increase the skills and confidence of
  practitioners, providers, parents and children to
  engage in open and equitable dialogues

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• For economy
• For education (learning is linked to wellbeing
  and sense of belonging)
• For social justice
• Therefore, respect for diversity is not an
  additional quality criterion, it is quality.
• But what is respect for diversity ?

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Multiple belongings

• Is it OK to be who I am?
• What is my place in this society?
• Fostering multiple belongings and taking in
  multiple forms of diversity
• Not making the other into the same (we all
  different but all equal)
• That is not othering the other (essentialism)
• Fostering interdependency as well as autonomy

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• Govment, policymakers and service providers are
  seeking to give emphasis and priority to
  respecting cultural diversity and valuing the
  multiple identities of children, families and
  communities.
• Differences enrich our society and make it an
  exciting and challenging place to be.

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• Identity is a key concept within education and
  how to deal with diversity.
• Proceeded by an adjective, national cultural
  or ethnic.
• Also used in political framework
• Used and misused as an argument for integration
  as well as for differentiation.

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• We simply cant afford not to invest in respect
  for diversity and social inclusion
• It is a matter of quality
• It is crucial, difficult and feasible
• It includes both culturalising curricula and
  deculturalisating structural exclusion

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Children Crossing Borders Study

• Recently, there have been efforts in many
  countries to plan better services for serving
  children of immigrants.
• But the voices of immigrant parents have too
  rarely been included in this planning.
• (And this is even more true for the voices of
  immigrant children.)

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• To improve services for children of recent
  immigrants in early childhood education and care
  (ECEC) settings by including the voices of
  immigrant parents and children.
• To compare parents, practitioners, and
  childrens beliefs about ECEC.
• To influence policy and practice towards
  immigrant families and their children.
• To model for parents and staff a process of
  engaging in dialogue about what should happen in
  ECEC settings.

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• We produced a series of five 20-minute videotapes
  showing typical days in ECEC centres that serve a
  significant number of children of recent
  im/migrants in England, France, Germany, Italy,
  and the USA.
• Used these videotapes to stimulate focus-group
  discussions with practitioners and parents (both
  immigrant and non-immigrant) at ECEC centres in
  multiple locations and contexts in each country.

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Analysis

• Content analysis
• Interpretive analysis
• Answerability (Mikhail Bakhtin). interpreting
  (for their can be no meaning-making without
  interpreting) and
• Replying (not just to the people we interview but
  to the wider world)

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Bakhtin Analysis

• Bakhtin emphasizes that utterances reflect the
  speaker, the listener, and the context of the
  interaction, both the immediate context (what the
  speaker and listener see and our experiencing)
  and the larger contextevents that have recently
  occurred. And the shared world of intertextual
  associations, speech conventions, etc.

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• Using the content analysis of these focus-groups
  we identified key areas of similarities and
  difference between immigrant parents and the
  teachers who care for their children.
• Our analysis also compared views of immigrant and
  non-immigrant parents and of immigrant parents
  and of practitioners living in five countries.

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• Our research to date points to the need for
  parents and the staff of ECEC programmes to
  engage in a more equitable dialogue about the
  means and ends of early childhood education and
  care.
• It also suggests that for various reasons this
  dialogue rarely happens without intervention and
  mediation.

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• Some of these reasons are straightforward
• parents and practitioners often do not speak a
  common language
• Some parents work long hours that make it
  difficult for them to spend much time in their
  childrens preschools beyond pick up and drop
  off.
• Other reasons are more subtle
• parents may perceive the preschool staff of
  holding prejudices (and in some cases they are
  right)
• Practitioners may perceive parents as not liking
  them and of disapproving of much of what they do
  (and in some cases they are right).

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Can the Subaltern speak?

• Problem of communication between ECEC staff and
  parents is more than just a problem of dialogue
  across cultural and class divides.
• Also a problem of dialogue across power
  differentials
• Gayatri Spivak poses as the question, Can the
  subaltern speak? and when they do, can their
  voices be heard?

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• When parents (especially immigrant parents) and
  the staff who teach and care for their children
  attempt to engage in dialogue, many barriers that
  need to be overcome.
• Needed is the creation of mechanisms that will
  allow this dialogue to take place and, when it
  does take place, to address the power asymmetries
  and other obstacles that can block understanding
  and connection on both sides.

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Key issues from focus groups

• Low parental engagement
• Lack of parent engagement too often is posed as a
  problem that implicitly blames parents for not
  taking sufficient interest in their childrens
  education.
• Parents focus groups suggests just the opposite
• Many parents, including and perhaps especially
  parents who have recently immigrated from another
  country, have a lot to say about early childhood
  education and care, a keen interest in what goes
  on in their childrens preschools and a deep-felt
  desire to be more involved in the school.

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• Biggest obstacle - they dont know how to be more
  involved
• ECECs programs to not know how to make themselves
  open to parents, especially immigrant parent
  involvement
• Parent involvement generally focusing on the
  school giving information to parents rather than
  on a more reciprocal, symmetrical dialogic
  relationship.

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• Parent involvement in ECEC is not just about
  practitioners getting better at explaining
  themselves to parents and giving more support and
  help to parents it is also about practitioners
  getting better at listening to parents.
• Listening to parents doesnt mean doing whatever
  they say rather, it requires a willingness and
  ability to enter into dialogue and negotiation
  with parents.
• This is especially true when the parents and
  practitioners come from different class,
  linguistic, and cultural backgrounds.

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• Cultural responsiveness doesnt mean being
  responsive only on issues that are easy for us to
  respond to, such as food, clothes, and holiday
  customs.
• It is around issues of knowledge, gender,
  pedagogy, and the body where cultural differences
  become more threatening and as a result people
  draw firmer lines.

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• Our project highlights the value of parent
  participation in ECEC programmes and points to
  the need for better communication between
  practitioners and parents who do not share a
  common cultural background or language.

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Cultural Negotiation From Research to
Implications for Practice and Policy

• Study highlights more explicit attention to the
  need not just for more parent education and
  parent participation but also an open exchange of
  information between practitioners and parents as
  well as for a process of cultural negotiation,
• A dialogue that includes discussion about the
  problems and possibilities of creating ECEC
  programmes that reflect the values and beliefs of
  both immigrant communities and of the societies
  to which they have immigrated.

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• It is wrong to assume or expect that if and when
  practitioners and parents from different cultural
  and class backgrounds come together to talk, that
  they will easily find common ground.
• The more parents and practitioners listen to each
  other, the better they may come to understand the
  depth of their differences as well as their
  similarities.

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• Our research and research by others suggests that
  practitioners and immigrant parents often hold
  different and sometimes contradictory beliefs
  about what should happen for young children in
  ECEC settings.
• Whats needed, then, is not just better
  communication between practitioners and parents
  but also a willingness and ability on both sides
  to engage in a process of negotiation across
  cultural and class divides.

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• We use the word negotiation because it carries
  a sense of politics and power that is not
  explicitly present in the term dialogue or
  communication.
• If practitioners and parents engage in
  negotiation, both have to be prepared to put
  their beliefs and preferences on the table and to
  compromise

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• When we are serious about listening to parents
  and perhaps, we will hear them expressing ideas
  about what should happen in ECEC settings that
  differ from our professional, progressive notions
  of best practice and quality.
• This is not suggesting that ECEC providers should
  drop their beliefs and values and do whatever
  parents ask.
• We are proposing that early childhood educators
  should enter into discussion and debate with the
  willingness to negotiate even their most closely
  held beliefs.

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• It is important to acknowledge and address the
  asymmetrical power relationships between
  practitioners and parents.
• This asymmetry cannot always be overturned, but
  it can be acknowledged and addressed.
• The research is a kind of needs assessment that
  points to areas of tension between all parents
  and the staff of the ECEC programmes their
  children attend.
• Key areas of disagreement and tension that have
  arisen in the parent and teacher focus groups we
  have conducted include

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• beliefs about the balance of academics and play
  in the ECEC curriculum
• approaches to home language maintenance and
  second language learning
• beliefs about how ECEC programmes should approach
  questions of religion, culture, multiple
  identities, racism and citizenship.

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• The focus-group discussions conducted with
  parents also challenge some stereotypes that
  educators sometimes hold about particular groups
  and communities.
• Stereotypes including the notion that some
  parents are not interested in having an active
  role in their childrens ECEC programmes
• That they have unsophisticated ideas about
  childrearing and early childhood education

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Possibilities Freires cultural circles

• Inspired by Freires dialogic and reflexive
  action in a pedagogy of the oppressed
• Working with those who are domesticated or
  silenced with the clear aim of liberation
• First step is consciousness raising and the
  development of selfhood in the oppressed with the
  intention of helping them to name their world and
  begin to shape it, i.e empowerment approach
• Co-construction of generative themes which are
  meaningful to participants which emerge through
  dialogue
• This work is supported through cultural circles
  in which symmetrical and reflexive dialogues
  occur between oppressors and oppressed
• Dialogues are developed through the introduction
  of cultural artefacts which generate emergent
  themes from which further action can flow.

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Opening Window

• I do not want my house to be walled in on all
  sides and my windows to be stuffed. I want the
  cultures of all the lands to be blown about my
  house as freely as possible. But I refuse to be
  blown off my feet by any.
• 
  Gandhi