Cultural Diversity in Early Childhood Practice

1. Cultural Diversity in Early Childhood Practice Dalvir Gill CREC Centre for Research in Early Childhood

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

3. 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

4. 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

5. 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” ?

6. 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

7. Gov’ment, 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.

8. ‘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.

9. We simply can’t 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

10. 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.)

11. 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 children’s 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.

12. 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.

13. 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)

14. 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 context—events that have recently occurred. And the shared world of intertextual associations, speech conventions, etc.

15. 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.

16. 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.

17. 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 children’s 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).

18. ‘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?

19. 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.

20. Keyissues 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 children’s 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 children’s preschools and a deep-felt desire to be more involved in the school.

21. Biggest obstacle - they don’t 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.

22. 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 doesn’t 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.

23. Cultural responsiveness doesn’t 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.

24. 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.

25. ‘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.

26. 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.

27. 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. • What’s 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.

28. 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

29. 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.

30. 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:

31. 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.

32. 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 children’s ECEC programmes; • That they have unsophisticated ideas about childrearing and early childhood education;

33. Possibilities:Freire’s ‘cultural circles’ • Inspired by Freire’s 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.

34. 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