Where do you come from?

We have been talking a lot about how children around the world live... What's different, and what's the same.. We have used books such as Playtime or Homes or even Hair to make the children become aware of the differences around them.

The Family Wall

I got news last week that I passed my couse on Equality and Diversity with high distinction. I was happy but I thought I would share with you all what had happened during the course of our last workshops. Maybe some of you will comment and let me know what they think.

At some stage during this last workshop, the use of a "family wall" was mentioned, as a tool to promote self-esteem. What is it? The children bring a picture of their family to school and we put them all together on a wall in our classroom and refer to it regularly. I have used a family wall in my setting since the very first year I opened up (I should have had a post written about it but for some reason, I never took the time to do so) . I was quite pleased to see that it was highly recommended by the Anti-bias Approach as a tool to promote inclusion, identity and a sense of belonging for all the children (and their family). I have since learnt in more details  to realise that when children feel that their relationships with their family, friends and community are valued and recognised, they feel more secure, more included and respected. So high 5 for me! I have been working in the right direction! The course has shown us how important it is to try to get to know each child individually. It was obvious to me from the beginning but the training voiced my beliefs loud and clear and reassured me that I was indeed being respectful in a very powerful way. Children love talking about their parents and what they do at home or what they do with their siblings. And real pictures are much more empowering than anything else. I love photography and have taken a few course in photography that concurred this statement. This is why I try to work with photos or any other “real” pictures as much as possible. The Family wall is a fantastic means to open up discussions among the children and to make them explore their own identity. It helps children to identify the various types of families in our society and our community: single-parent family, families living with the grandparents, divorced/separated parents etc… I also found that it is a great way for Rachel and I to get to know the parents better and to connect with them as they come in and have a look at our family wall.

During the discussion with other practitioners, I was asked if I could think of any other benefits of the family wall. I explained that we use it straight away in September to make the connection between home and the preschool. It is used as a bridge to reassure newcomers. If they are missing their mams or dads, we show them the wall and let them talk about their family. However, when I mentioned that we don’t keep the family wall on our wall in the classroom all year long, our tutor objected strongly, vehemently insisting that I HAD to keep it up all the time. I disagreed explaining that it was my own experience (and Rachel’s) that children get “bored” of the Family wall after a while and don’t actually look at it anymore, which usually prompt us to move on to another inclusive way  or activity to promote identity and belonging. For example, this next September, we are going to use a teddy as a little mascot and we will ask each child to bring it home with him/her and take pictures of something that he/she did with the teddy during their daily routine. We will get the parents on board and provide them with a little camera. We will ask parents to write a quick summary describing the picture they took together. Once each child has had a turn with the teddy and the camera, I will have the pictures printed and I will bind them in a little book with all the corresponding notes. I really hope that this will be popular among the children and the parents. And you can be sure to find a post about this next September or October.  Anyway, this was one of the example I gave our group.

Yet, our tutor that day blatantly criticised my decision not to have the wall up all year long. She didn’t give me much chance to express myself and the other practitioners were basically asked to side with her or with me!  I found it very peculiar as we have been talking all along about accepting other people’s opinions and ways. After all, isn’t it what the course is about? It was shocking to be honest. Being trained in equality and Diversity has taught me to be more open and to be reflective. We have worked very hard to critically assess ourselves and to ditch our blinkers. This course is only a beginning for all us but little steps matter as Louise Derman-Sparks mentioned in her article “Education without prejudice”. Yet, I truly and honestly believe that I am doing the right thing by diversifying my approaches in the classroom to ensure the children feel included, valued and respected. I am not a one-trick pony and there are many other ways to reach these goals.  I felt chastised for not using the family Wall all year long. So this knocked me a little bit off course and confused me. I expected the journey on this course to have its ups and downs but this “incident” rattled my confidence and got me thinking “am I doing it right? Am I completely off the rails?”. Since that day, I have been thinking and I stick to my guns. The Family Wall is a wonderful tool but it wouldn’t work in our setting if I was to leave it up all the time. We need diversity too in the way we approach the topic!

see my post "Inclusive practice is good practice" right here.

Inclusive practice is good practice

Inclusive practice is good practice. What does it mean? Well, to us, preschool teachers, this means working with each child to help them build their self-esteem: listening to them, encouraging them to talk about themselves, and giving them the opportunities to express themselves. This also means asking the children to talk about how they feel, how they look, what they enjoy, who they are within their own family, what origins they come from, who their friends are etc.. This creates a sense of identity and belonging, which is exactly what Louise Derman Sparks highlighted in goal 1 of her Anti-Bias Approach.

Activities that allow preschoolers to discuss their emotions and better identify and read the emotions of others is a key aspect in building emotional intelligence at an early age, which in the long run, can assist children to grow into discerning adults that can relate to others effectively. Studies show that emotional intelligence is just as important (if not more important) than intellectual intelligence in the workplace, so it is important for young children to learn how best to read the body language of peers as early as possible.   Here is a list of what can be done in a classroom:

•  Emotion collage: with the help of their parents, children can select photos of themselves in various state of emotions. Once you get the photos, scan the hotos onto printer paper so that the child can cut ou their image and paste them onto a large sheet of construction paper. The children can present to the class what emotions they were experiencing in each photo.
• Picture cards showing different emotions. use them at circle time and ask the children to pick one of them and explain to their friends why they have picked this one. Some may pick the "sad" picture card and explain that their mam didn't let him finish their picture this morning because Mam was rushing to work. This may seem trivial to us but this i a big deal for a 4 year old!!! You can buy these cards anywhere really, but you can make your own too!!

Encouraging children to share their family life with their peers in the setting make them feel included too. Practitioners can then gradually build on that sense of self and belonging and help the children feel that they are also part of the setting's community, and eventually part of a community out in the world. Having a "family wall" which celebrates "who we are" is a good starting point. Ask the children to bring photos of their parents and siblings and other members of their family as well as pictures of people who are important in their lives (not just blood relatives). 

(Picture borrowed from Preschool4all)

Here you have a facililty who created a Friendship Wall...

I have to admit that I have never thought about writing a post about our little family wall (we are a small setting!). Shame on me! I believe this is a brilliant way to teach children about what families look like and make them feel included, secured and valued. So there will definitely be a follow-up on this post, as far as I am concerned, next September with plenty of photos.

Some people may be asking themselves why it is so important for children to feel good about themselves. Simple. When you are starving and your belly rumbles and grumbles, can you honestly concentrate on what you are doing? All you think about is food!! Well, this is exactly the same about children. If their basic needs are not met, they can not learn. If a child feels isolated, excluded or not accepted, how can you expect that child to participate in class activities? He won't speak much, won't participate in class activities and will tend to withdraw because he doesn't feel that he belongs, Thus, hindering his learning progress.

Empowering the children is also part of bring an inclusive practice. Empowering supports positive attitudes, cooperative friendships, interactions and curiosity about the world. Empowering children again means listening to the children, respecting them and helping them to think critically. It is about helping children to make up their mind about what is fair or unfair. And it is very important at that stage to help them recognise differences and similarities around them. If children don't spot differences, children might then feel frighetened or angry later on in their young life. It is important also to let children know that if there are things that they don't understand, it's ok to ask questions and to inquire. For example, when children observe a peer with a disability or special requirement, they should feel free and at ease to ask why their peer is behaving a certain way. Staff can reassure them that sometimes, we all need a bit of help. The point is that children learn from one another as Montessori often stated. Children from mainstream backgrounds will learn from a child with a special educational requirements and vice versa. Nobody loses in the process. Everybody gains and moves forward. Some move forward a little bit slower than others. But we all move forward. That's what matters and that's the message children must get. Again, there are lots of activities to challenge the children, make them spot differences and learn to feel comfortable with diversity. For instance, at circle time, ask them to say something nice about the child sitting beside them: "I like Joe's hair, I like Susie's shoes, I like Robby's glasses" etc... Don't be surprised if one of them decide to say that he/she doesn't like his/her own hair. I will refer you here to one of the activities I did with my children at thebeginning of the year, called "The best part of me" during which I asked the children to think about a part of their body that they liked the most. Another great way to promote self-esteem.  You could also decide to compare hands at circle time.

Ask the children to lay their hands flat on the floor and compare skin tones, nails, finger lengths, hands size, nail lengths etc...

The use of persona dolls is also becoming quite popular to challenge stereotypes and counter discrimination. Pesona dolls encourage children to empathise and solve problems the doll is experiencing. To enable the childrento bond with the doll and identify with it, the doll is given a persona (a name, personality, lifestyle, family, cultural background ..). Once they have been introduced to the doll, the children listen and react to stories woven around the dolls.

    

I knew this post was going to be quite long. So I will stop right here and will write the second part of his post later on. These are some of my recollections as I reach the end of my Equality and Diveristy course. I hope they inspire you too.....

My rant on the Anti-bias Approach !!!

When I wrote my post on the Anti-bias approach and the continent boxes, I never realised I was going to open up such an interesting debate. Karen, Fiona and My Boy’s Teacher have helped me walk through my journey of multiculturalism awareness and I thank them so much for that. It prompted me to think a bit more. I asked myself if children are actually aware of racism? Aware of differences?  Louise D.Sparks believes that they are. I wouldn’t be so sure here in Ireland. And this is where my teacher probably turns into a blind ideologue as My Boy’s Teacher mentioned in her comment. You have to be realistic, objective and true to what is actually going on at your own doorstep. Ireland’s ethnical and cultural diversity is far from being as profuse and extended as in the USA, where the Anti-bias approach comes from. Yes, we have welcomed thousands of Eastern European immigrants to Ireland for the past 15 years and the number of asylum seekers has considerably and steadily risen too according to Irish statistics. However, the differences my teacher or Louise Sparks are talking about are definitely not as noticeable as they make it. If children notice a child with a different coloured skin, a different language or with a disability, I don’t believe they would actually be aware of racism or behave in any racist way. Maybe I am naïve. But this is what I can observe in my classroom. If children are much aware of racial differences, they do not act upon it. Not at their age. They ask why the little boy is black or why he is in a wheel chair, get an answer (hopefully an answer that is completely anti-bias!!) and move on. The child will not ponder on it. The difference will be accepted as normal and acceptable if explainedproperly. However, I do agree with Louise D.Sparks that avoiding talking about differences will not turn the child into a non-prejudiced human being! The problem is that children learn the prevailing social attitudes toward these differences whether or not they are in direct contact with people different from themselves. And they learn these attitudes from us.

So, as a childcare practitioner (and a Mam of 4), what do I do? Yes, I know.. I can hear my teacher.. Follow the goals of the anti-bias approach and apply them in my curriculum. I understand that. I appreciate that and I think I have already done a good job. Yet, as many of you have said, we are dealing with children of 2 to 4.5 years of age here. Well, in my classroom at least. As My Boy’s Teacher simply said “a three year old engaged in critical thinking about social justice? Really? Does that sync with what we know about how a 3 year old thinks?”. Let’s go back to theory. Piaget believed that children build intuitive concepts from immediate hand-on experiences, allowing them to develop more complex and logical thoughts. Yes, children see differences. And the answers they get when they ask questions about these differences are extremely important. A three- to five-year-old in Piaget’s pre-operational stage will be mainly interested in observable differences: physical differences and cultural ones (the way we dress, the way we talk, the way we eat). Hence the importance of our continent boxes in our classroom as a constant reference to other cultures. These boxes can revisited all through the year, whenever we want to. OK. So, children observe. But their experiences are very limited and when they are confronted to something they don’t recognise or something new, their first reaction is to use a past experience or memory to explain it. Piaget called the children “egocentric”. I can give you one example: last week, a little girl came back to school after a 10 days absence. She had been quite sick and had spent 3 days in hospital. She had been treated by a black doctor in Wexford Hospital. A few days later, as she was going to Penney’s, she spotted the security guard at the entrance of the shop. He was black.  Her father told me that she pointed straight at him and said to her father: “look, here is my doctor!”.  

Their second reaction when confronted to something new is to “classify”. Just like that little girl did. In Montessori, classification is a very important skill we work on in the classroom because  classifying helps children to get information about the world around them, as well as to develop their thinking and reasoning. Classifying can start as early as toddlerhood, when a child might put items together by attributes. Children love putting together objects they think are alike and this help them to closely observe and organize according to specific characteristics. Anyway, I am starting to rant here. All this to say that children ask questions or make comments which reflect the way they classify in their heads. How can you look different and still be in the same group? An example comes to my mind: we have a little girl in our classroom born in Ireland but whose parents are both non-nationals. We had been talking about languages and I mentioned her parents spoke a different language just like I do or just like Bibi (our substitute teache) do too. A few days later, a boy asked her:

-          “ you are not Irish?”

-          “yeh…”

-          “but your mam speaks different”

-          “but I am Irish..”

-          “well, not really..”

Of course, I stepped in and used this incident as a teachable moment and explained that the little girl was born in Ireland and that you could be Irish and speak 2 or 3 different languages.

My point here is that most of the time, here, in a preschool setting (2 to 5 year olds), in rural Ireland, children’ s developmental stages have to be taken into consideration before jumping into the conclusion that they are having a racist attitude (derived from what their parents said, what they have seen on tv or from any stereotypes they might have encountered).  Though becoming aware of the impact we, adults, can have of these malleable and absorbing little minds is important to put things into perspective and realize that theories and approaches created in America do not apply word for word to every situation here in Ireland. My teacher is doing her job by opening up our mind and opening discussions among childcare providers. However, she should not be narrow minded, especially when she herself has no experience in childcare. She has worked as a social worker and has been trained in equality and diversity . She has mainly worked with Irish travellers. The ABA arose from an deep-rooted American societal and cultural issue; America is  a big “melting pot” and is a nation originally created by several other nations. Ireland ‘s diversity is much more tamed. In community groups where traveller children are sent, it is important to respect their culture and ways of life and explain it to the other children (though from what I gather from colleagues, most traveller family do not want to singled out and would rather blend in). Though there is a very small percentage of ethnical or cultural diversity, the differences in our rural society are much more socially and economically embedded. And preschoolers would not be as aware of that type of differences. So at that stage, my role is to open up my preschoolers’s horizons, prompt them to ask questions and give them the “right” answers…. OK.. What a rant!!! My apologies for such a lengthy post but it has helped me putting my thoughts in order…

Are our continent boxes tokenistic?

Last September 2011, I started a course on Diversity and Equality in childcare practices. The core of the course is based on Louise Derman-Sparks’s Anti-bias Approach. The Anti Bias Approach is focused on what educators and carers can do to work against discrimination. In effect the Anti Bias Approach is saying that by teaching from a social justice perspective that respects and includes all cultures, children’s learning will be more meaningful. For those who might not have heard of Anti Bias Approaches, a short history follows.

The Anti Bias Curriculum (1989) began in the United States from a group of activist educators who were “dissatisfied with current curriculum for helping children learn about diversity” (Derman-Sparks,1989).

Louise Derman-Sparks

So, the curriculum occurred in a political and historical context influenced by the USA civil rights movement and the feminist movements in the 1960’s. In other parts of the world similar work also emerged because children’s services staff recognised the importance of dealing with issues of multiculturalism and antidiscrimination in their daily work. This international work grew out of policy changes, human rights movements and activists who were determined to make a difference in the lives of children and families.

  

The main principles of this way of working with children include:

• construct a knowledgeable, confident self identity (for children to be confident about who they are)

• develop comfortable, empathetic and just interaction with diversity (for children to be accepting of difference)

• develop critical thinking (for children to be critical about injustice)

• and the skills for standing up for oneself and others in the face of injustice (for children to act upon injustice)

Some of you might talk about multiculturalism instead of Anti-bias Approach. It is important to distinguish between both approaches because both ideas play different roles in children’s services and society, but both are equally important. In some ways, Multiculturalism is seen by many as a way of ‘including all cultures’ or ‘celebrating culture’ which gives the impression that all cultures are equally valued in society, but of course they are not. Unfortunately, it is often shaped around Government policy that has the power to allocate resources to institutions. An Anti Bias Approach, on the other hand, has been created specifically in the context of children’s services. This is an approach that is embedded in each service and can be adapted to each method of education, each philosophy, whether you are using A Montessori, Steiner or High Scope way of teaching. This  AB approach sets out to recognise the existing bias, discrimination and injustice that many people experience on a daily basis.

One of the great risks to meaningful work around multiculturalism and anti bias work is ‘The Tourist Approach’. Louise Derman-Sparks (1989) discusses the dangers of visiting a culture “for the day” in order to learn about difference, instead of meaningfully sharing cultural experiences, stories and ideas. Vajda in The Anti-Bias Approach in Early Childhood (2001, 31) shows the problems of a ‘Tourist Approach’:

A ‘tourist’ approach to an anti-bias, multicultural curriculum is better than denying the ethnic and racial multicultural nature of (…) society, but it can itself be limiting and even in some cases destructive. It forgets that culture, race, ethnicity and family influence children every day of their lives, not just on one special day of the year. A tourist approach is more likely to encourage stereotypes than to dispel them.

(emphasis added)

So, the challenge for children’s services staff is to seek ways to avoid tokenism and the ‘tourist approach’ and instead share meaningful experiences. In a Montessori environment, a Directress would present the children with the Common Needs of People (sometimes referred to as the Fundamental Needs of Humans). This series of lessons is meant to show students that throughout history, humans have demonstrated the same common needs:food, shelter, clothing, surviving, communication, etc… Maria Montessori believed it was important to study what humans have in common to instill in the child a greater sense of belonging to the universe. In a Montessori classroom, through the curriculum, children learn about similaritites and differences of different people around the world, building a connection and creating a great sense of belonging.   The Montessori curriculum strives to create a connection between home and school environment. And shows the children that it is okay to be different, along with the need to respect the differences of others.

The first thing I usually do at the beginning of the year is to get to know the families I welcome in my setting. I asked parents to fill in a few forms asking for the child’s birthplace, the family members and names, the languages spoken at home, their religion and special customs or traditions, the traditional cultural items/food they could share with the other kids etc…

I thought about displaying the information I will gather next year using a large world map in our Montessori classroom as a wonderful visual reminder to the plreschool community that we are all a celebration of cultural differences and similarities. This would be a great way too to involve families even more throughout the year as you study the different cultures around the world.

We also have our Montessori geography curriculum which goes on throughout the year. And one thing I started doing last year, shortly after creating my blog, was to put together “Continental Boxes”. Many of my blogger friends around the world (homeschoolers or preschool teachers) led the way and inspired me to do the same. You can study each continent for a week or a month, depending on how many materials you have and how in-depth you want to take the study. You can check a few of the boxes I have made by linking to my categories on the right hand side of the blog.

This is the contents from The African continent box - Counting Coconuts Blog

Back to my course… I will spare you my whole frustration with this course. My assistant Rachel and I have been studying together and we find the teacher quite narrow-minded and her teaching excessively repetitive. Anyway! When she asked some of us what we have set up in our classroom that would complement the goals of the Anti-bias approach, I mentioned my work on the continent boxes. I explain what they were for, how we use them etc.. Her reaction left me speechless. Apparently, these continent boxes are just what she calls “tokenism”. I looked up on the internet to make sure I got the correct meaning of the word:

1. The policy of making only a perfunctory effort or symbolic gesture toward the accomplishment of a goal, such as racial integration.

2. The practice of hiring or appointing a token number of people from underrepresented groups in order to deflect criticism or comply with affirmative action rules: "Tokenism does not change stereotypes of social systems but works to preserve them, since it dulls the revolutionary impulse" (Mary Daly).

OK. Not what our continent boxes are at all. I have obviously given her the wrong picture and I am definitely going to bring one or two of them with me to the next class to make sure she understands how efficient these boxes can be when trying to open up horizons. I know some clogs from Holland or beret from France might look very tokenistic and might present information about each group much like a tourist would experience it when visiting another country. These could be seen as stereotypes such : “all Latinos dance and eat tacos, all African Americans are athletic and eat collard greens, and all Native

Americans wear headdresses and do war dances, etc”. But the continent boxes are so much more. Continent boxes traditionally contain information, photographs, and objects related to the study of a particular continent. In a complete study of the world, you’ll end up with seven continent boxes. You can have pictures and/or postcards of the flags (though my teacher reckons flags are also very tokenistic!!!), people, places, animals, plants, and culture of each continent. There could be specific categories in each box such as the food, artwork, or musical instruments of a particular continent. We all add objects we find to represent the continent such as plastic animals and plants, real money and stamps, souvenirs, miniature dolls in costume, etc… Is this tokenism? What do you think? Is she right? Am I wrong? Am I the one who is narrow-minded? Am I kidding myself?