A child's first

place of learning is home. It's the place where children find meaning and develop a

sense of self: who they are, including their family cultural imprint.

Each child, family, and educator has his or her own

unique culture of how to live, eat, sleep,

talk, dress, play, think,

work, and socially and emotionally interact.

Culture is not something someone else has. It is something

we all have.

We have hugely diverse families: non-english speaking families

of Chinese, Indian, Russian,

many different Indian dialects. We have from little

children up. They generally come with no language at all except

their home language, no English language, very obviously they have lots of other languages.

By the time they get to kindergarten, they are speaking fluently in

English with huge vocabularies and that's going to make their journey to the public school

much better. It's also wonderful for the other children

in the class to become aware that there are very many

diverse people, colors, shapes,

languages. We learn everybody's language a little bit.

By the time the get to be three, between three and five, they all learn parts of each other's

language. We do a lot of discussion of different people

in different cultures. We do a lot of

everyday discussions of different foods, different clothing. It's not

any particular unit on

live it with them. As diverse environments grow, there's

critical need in the early childhood community for cultural competence,

or what is described as the ability to understand diverse view points

and appropriately interact with members of other cultures in a range of situations.

I think cultural competency is another

thing that I look at. I think that the world that we are living

in, we need to share that

with our children. We all come to this

field with biases. It's just what it is in our life, but we

have to look beyond those biases and

understand that cultural competency is more

than just knowing what holidays people celebrate.

There's so much more to that. It's a wonderful opportunity for

some training with staff members, but you need to be open to it.

Supporting cultural understanding and diversity

within a program means knowing and engaging all families.

Whenever a new family starts with us, we always do a getting to know you interview.

So we sit down with them and we ask them questions about their home life and about their background,

who they live with. So the teachers can connect with the children on a more personal level.

Tell me about your brother. How is your mom or your dad?

That way they also don't ask inappropriate questions like, how is your dad, if

the child doesn't live with the dad. We have Middle Eastern families, we have African,

Jamaican families. We have a lot of South American families

here, Puerto Rican families. Every different kind of

family here. Our teachers really take the time

to make sure they say hello to everyone in the morning. They ask parents how

their day was, how their morning was, how their job is

going? They make sure they get to know them through home visits and

conferences as well. We have four different conferences every year or home visits

depending. During that time we sit down with the families and we really

talk about what their goals are and what their reasoning for having their children

here is and what they expect to get out of it and how we can help them work towards those

goals together. What constitutes a family?

We try to avoid saying parents, instead we say family members, because

it may not be a biological parent,

it may be two same sex parents or it could be a

grandparent, it could be an aunt, it could be someone unrelated to

the child caring for the child. So I think it's the understanding of that.

We also have to look at the whole economic diversity.

We have families...85% of our families are low income

and qualify for some type of child care eligibility

and subsidy. We also have families who don't and families who are

more well off. There's nobody rich in today's society when you have a child

in child care. We know how expensive it is, but you need to

talk about what the expectations are

and what people's beliefs are. We have

diversity of religion. What's important for us to know is not necessarily

what religion they are, but what is it that they celebrate in their family?

What things are important to them?