Learning About Fairness: Culture, Language, and Economic Class
Program Transcript
[MUSIC]
NARRATOR: Early childhood educators, Leslie Cheung and Eric Hoffman, emphasize creating environments that respect and acknowledge diversity, and truly honor families, in order to help children develop the understanding needed to internalize respect, and interact with fairness and equity.
LESLIE CHEUNG: So one of the challenges, when dealing with social economic class and culture and language, is the differences between the families. Because they all come in together from different places, from different social economic places, from different languages, from different countries, from different family cultures. And what I mean family cultures is, every family- – for example my family is Chinese. But we’re Chinese American. So we have a cross culture in my family of Chinese and American. So it’s going to look a little different than the Chinese that come over as fresh immigrants, versus my family where I am first born in this country.
So we have that dynamic that plays in the classroom. And with that, you have different thought forms that other families have. Maybe stereotypes they have, biases they might have, ideas and assumptions they might have of what this other family– and how they might conduct their life that’s different from their own. So with that challenge, it gives us the opportunity to create our classroom environment in a way where– for example, I would bring in for a parent meeting, I would ask each family to bring a home dish. And with food we bring instant love. We share something that’s mutually fantastic. But then you have this beautiful array of food from these different places, these different family cultures. You have your tamales, next to your noodles, next to this turkey.
And the next thing you know, the families have opened up and they’ve started sharing stories amongst each other. And when they are open like that and they have something to look forward to they’re happy, their bellies are full, they’re smiling and laughing with each other. They’re talking about recipes. All of a sudden any assumptions, any biases, any stereotypes, that wall starts to trickle down a little bit. And they start to meet each other on an equal playing field, that they’re just really enjoying their time together. And getting to know each other, and building community within the classroom. So that hey, could Joey come over and play with Sarah tomorrow after school?
ERIC HOFFMAN: Children coming into my classroom are fascinated with both similarities and differences in the classroom. And so a huge part of my curriculum is bringing that in, in many many many many ways. I just want it to be part of the culture of our classroom. That we can talk about those things. So when it comes to more difficult issues, children are prepared to talk about that too. When we talk about differences in culture, differences in economic class, differences in language, it just is another way that children are similar and different. And it’s not so emotionally laden that people get scared to talk about it. So I’ve had children, for example, with a new child coming in say, you have to be the bad guy in this game because you talk funny. Now that’s because– I can’t go to that child and shame them for that kind of thing, it’s their best interpretation of what they’ve learned about the culture, mainly through media. Many children’s shows have a bad guy with strong accents. But I have to both help that child learn something new about how the world works, and also protect the child who’s coming in who might feel really insulted or feel hurt by that kind of a comment.
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So being able to talk already about similarities and differences is a way to say, oh look yes you’re different in this way. You speak different languages and have different ways of talking, and both of you love watercolors. And both of you– you know, this is how you’re the same and different. And isn’t that great, isn’t that wonderful. And talking to the one child, do you want to only be the bad guy? No. And so isn’t that interesting? You believe that they have to be the bad guy, and they don’t want to. I have to give children time to think about it, I can’t talk them out of their beliefs. But usually within a couple weeks, they’ve changed their minds.
So I like to bring in those issues, differences in culture, on a very child sized level. They’re not ready for these huge issues that disturb adults. We talk about differences in the way families do things. What they eat for breakfast, and how they get to school, and what kind of animal they sleep with when they go to bed. Those are the kinds of childlike differences, child questions, that I like to focus on. And we touch on different economic class, different kinds of housing that people use, different kinds of transportation, through those really concrete examples. Not through abstract discussions.