Interculturalism: Addressing Diversity in Early Childhood

Early childhood educators work a lot with children and their family from different backgrounds, so it’s important for teachers and educators to gain their knowledge about cultural diversity, support and respect everyone backgrounds. Multiculturalism believes that everyone from all over the world should have the same equal learning opportunities with positive attitudes from the educators.

Interculturalism believes that we are living in a diverse society so everyone will have the opportunities to learn across cultures and share their own culture’s specials to promote connection and understanding. Teachers and educators after having a good understanding about cultural diversity, they will be doing a better job on introducing them to the children so the children will develop a good understanding how everyone is special and unique in their own way. The job of early childhood teachers and educators is to demonstrate respect and sensitivity toward children and their families with different backgrounds or ethnicities.

Teachers are the connection between the children in the classroom and the children to their families when they are at school. To meet the need of the families and their children, teachers and educators should avoid assumption about individual’s tradition or belief, be more aware and increase sensitivity about family composition and their cultures. Teachers and educators should set up a classroom that can teach and help the children discuss about individual’s background, culture, belief, and allow and support the children to set up significant items from home such as family pictures or what is really meaningful for them, then teachers can ask for the children to share their stories about those items to their classmates. Some teaching strategies that can help the teacher to demonstrate culture diversity are including introduce cultural differences through games or stories, ask for family recording a story in their home language to read a book or demonstrate intercultural understanding though their basic actions such as going potty, taking naps or having meals.

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