Introduction: The Adults in Children’s Lives
nteracting with young children in ways that are most beneficial is more than possessing good teaching techniques and affection for youngsters as individuals. It is important for teachers to realize that much of what children are comes from their family and cultural backgrounds, and that this fact determines, to great extent, their responses to what their teachers do and say.
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In the education field, it is often regarded as a truism that parents are children’s first teachers. The intent of this statement is to convey the point of the parents being first sequentially, but also as first in importance. This reminder is a good one for teachers and caregivers to keep in mind, but it needs to go further, given the many models of family in today’s world. In this chapter we will discuss some of these models and how they impact what children bring to a center or to school.
Also of importance is the cultural community and its influence on young children. As one writer has powerfully stated, educators “must view each child and family within a framework that encompasses the entire political, social, economic, cultural, and spiritual experience that shapes the identity and behavior of the families and children with whom they work. The one-size-fits-all approach is a gross oversight . . .”(Prater, 2002, p. 150). So then, not only must teachers remember to place their children in a large and complex cultural context, but their families as well, and this chapter will discuss these issues.
There is another community that teachers and caregivers must learn to be skillful partners of,
| As children’s first teachers, parents are responsible for what their children know upon entering school. How might different backgrounds impact what a young learner brings to a center or to school?
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and it is visibly around them every day. It is the community of their own workplace. Collaboration, cooperation, skillful communication, and effective listening with colleagues are all important to professionalism. This chapter will provide specific suggestions for successfully negotiating |
Artiga Photo/Corbis the workplace world.
The concept of an interdependency of home, school, center, school, community, and culture is a complex one that has been studied for more than half a century with a single figure at the forefront of emerging theory and research. In the next section we discuss the thought and influence of the Russian-American Urie Bronfenbrenner (1917–2005).