Creating Affirming Environments

An anti-bias environment is also culturally consistent for the children and families it currently serves.  Children also need materials that honor diversity both within and beyond their own identity groups.

Louise Derman-Sparks, 2010, Anti-Bias Education for Yong Children and Ourselves

 

   I would set up a school that recognizes all cultures that enrolls.  My desire would be for children from any country to feel safe and welcome in my classroom.  I want the parents feel comfortable with their child’s surroundings and caregivers. 

Books from diverse cultures such as disabilities, African-American, Asian, Asian-American, Native Americans, Islanders, White, Hispanic, so many others will be in my library.  Music will be from as many cultures I can find, such as the DVD, I have from the Navajo Nation

There would be pictures on the wall of children from a variety of nations in many differencing situations. Pictures of me with twins from the Apache Nation, pictures from West Africa, Australia, and Manhattan, Kansas are a part of the pictures on the walls.

Toys will include persona dolls, vehicles of transportation different from those used in the USA.  Other toys might include blocks, tangrams, and animals from domestic to extinct, to dinosaurs, and dress-up with articles from some of the parents that have had children in the class. 

     Art would include free-easel, table painting, pasting, cutting, sugar-chalk coloring, free coloring, printed pictures, are only some of the activities. 

     In the preschool, I taught in two years ago, I did what the book calls Tourism but I did it as Tourist.  We had passports, and little packed suitcases.  We traveled to the countries that I had visited while I was doing mission work.  I had clothes, recipes for meals, pictures and maps showing the children where we were going and how long we would be gone.  We, also, traveled to the countries three of our children were from: China, Bangladesh, and South Africa. 

     I would have numbers one to ten in three languages: English, Spanish, and French on the wall.  I would use other numbers as I learned from the children and parents. 

 A little story:  I had a three-year-old Chinese girl who came to my class that could only say, “Hi” and “Thank you”.  After 6 months, she was speaking English and surprising her parents.  One day her father brought her to class, I asked her if she had told her daddy that she could count in French.  He said, “No she does not know French.”  I asked her to count for him.  She counted to ten in French and her father laughed.  “You, an English White woman teaching my little Chinese daughter to speak French. How funny but thank you.” He left the room laughing. 

Toileting and diapering is done on a changing table that the children can climb on themselves.  This is a time of privacy, but when questions are asked, they are answered clearly with correct wording in the appropriate development language. 

References:

Derman-Sparks, L., & Olsen Edwards, J. (2010). Anti-bias education for young children and ourselves.     Washington, D.C.: National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC).