• Educators understand, respect, and validate the diverse needs of children entering the early childhood classroom; they hold high expectations for achievement for all students.
• Educators develop a self-awareness of culture and the role it plays in their beliefs, attitudes, and expectations. They also seek an understanding of how diverse cultures are expressed through schooling, communication patterns, and child rearing.
• Teachers and others work as a team to design developmentally appropriate curriculum and instruction that not only meets the needs of individual children but also reflects the diversity of the group.
• Teachers have a repertoire of developmentally appropriate, research-based learning strategies that are known to be successful in working with children from a variety of cultures and children with disabilities.
• The classroom environment reflects diversity in the selection of books and other learning materials; the classroom is set up to provide barrier-free access and to promote interaction among all students.
• Sustained professional development supports the educational team in developing self-awareness, a base of knowledge, and skill in working with diverse groups of students.
• Teachers are familiar with resources in the local and global community that can support efforts to meet children's diverse needs.
• Parents are involved in decision making at the school to ensure that programs are culturally sensitive and meet the needs of students and families.
• Children whose first language is not English are supported in use of their home language while learning English.
• Children respect and value the diversity in the classroom and in the local and global communities.

ACTION OPTIONS: The school community can take the following steps to implement an effective early childhood program that takes into account the diverse needs of young students:

Administrators:

• Regularly review school and district policies related to educational equity, and develop policies essential for achieving developmentally appropriate practices.
• Provide adequate staffing and assistance to meet the many needs in diverse classrooms.
• Learn about cultural diversity and early education. Ensure that the school has a goal of valuing diversity.
• Consider recruiting and supporting early childhood educators who are trained in languages other than English and who are comfortable working with culturally diverse groups.
• Require early childhood educators to have formal training in child development, children with special needs, language acquisition, appropriate instruction and assessment techniques, curriculum development, and strategies to involve diverse parents.
• Develop strategies for integrating children with disabilities into preschool and elementary school.
• Develop strategies for educating language-minority children.
• Ensure that early childhood programs for language-minority students are based on developmentally appropriate and culturally appropriate practices. Promote the value of fostering second language development in young children.
• Inquire about how teachers view their role in instructing children with diverse cultural backgrounds. Encourage teachers to reflect on their classroom practice to ensure they are providing positive learning experiences for all students.
• Provide encouragement and incentives for teachers to participate in staff development in early childhood education as well as staff development in multilingual multicultural schools.
• Select professional development topics that promote teacher understanding of diversity. Build upon multicultural strategies sometimes used in preservice environments.
• Promote collaboration in schools serving students with limited English proficiency and other special needs.
• Create opportunities for multidisciplinary staff to share information easily and plan together; ensure that the schedule allows adequate time for professional development and planning.
• Follow or develop local guidelines, based on state and federal guidelines and mandates, to enable students to learn English while striving to preserve and promote the home languages of children.
• Reflect various language groups in school signs and in communication with families.
• Encourage planning for parent participation in schools for young children.
• Ensure that the school climate makes parents feel respected and valued.
• Seek out cultural organizations and community agencies to serve as resources and partners in the educational process. To locate such groups, confer with other educators and consult local chambers of commerce and public libraries.
  
  

  Brenda Rodriguez, interim director of the Chicago Public Schools project of the Center for School and Community Development at North Central Regional Educational Laboratory, discusses the importance of connecting with the community to promote cultural understanding and form partnerships in education. [280k audio file] Excerpted from a videotaped interview with Brenda Rodriguez (North Central Regional Educational Laboratory, 1998).

  
  

• Ensure compliance with federal, state, and local regulations on providing services to children with disabilities and providing a barrier-free environment.

Teachers:

• Develop an awareness of culture and an understanding that culture influences all humans.
• Believe that all children are capable of learning. Set high standards and maintain high expectations for all students while understanding that children have natural developmental differences as they grow.
• Participate in instructional teaming and collaboration with special education teachers or bilingual resource specialists to ensure that appropriate educational strategies are used for children with diverse needs.
• Using a transdisciplinary approach, consult with other professionals both inside and outside the school building to develop reachable goals for each child.
• Develop strategies for inclusion in the preschool setting.
• Structure the physical environment—including physical space, toys, and materials—to promote play, engagement, and learning for all the students in the classroom. Keep in mind children with disabilities when designing the classroom environment.
• Use naturalistic teaching strategies to respond to individual students within the context of naturally occurring classroom activities. Such strategies are helpful for enabling children to reach individual goals and for challenging insensitive behavior when it occurs.
• Use flexible assessment strategies to build on each child’s strengths. The assessment plan must note any accommodation or support the child needs to be successful in the classroom. Keep in mind the major purposes of assessment in programs for young children: instructional planning, needs identification, program evaluation, and communication with parents.
• Become aware of various cultural influences and social conventions that affect how children and their parents and families communicate and interact. Children may differ in their cultural patterns in perception or communication styles, such as wait time for responses, eye contact in answering, and style of interacting with adults. Teachers should adjust instruction accordingly.
• Learn about the various cultural traditions and languages of school families to understand and respect cultural differences.
• Develop and implement an early childhood curriculum that is culturally responsive and anti-bias to help children learn the value of human diversity.
• Realize that bilingualism is an asset, not a deficit. Learn to become comfortable with children speaking their native language. Foster bilingual acquisition in preschool children. Try to promote the home languages of children while they are learning English.
• Develop strategies for supporting home-language use at school.
• Provide classroom books, displays, props, and materials that reflect the diversity of society. With the school librarian, choose children's books that reflect diversity.
• Eliminate stereotypical and inaccurate materials from the classroom.
• Use multicultural resources in the classroom: family stories, children’s literature, parent storytelling, music and drama, and field trips.
• Incorporate minority students’ language and culture into school programs.
• Involve parents in classroom planning sessions. Discuss and share information on multicultural goals, language-acquisition goals, parents’ goals for their disabled children, and values in nontraditional homes.
• Use parents as resource people and involve them in specific curriculum activities in the classroom.
• Regularly share information and goals with parents through letters, newsletters, phone calls, and parent group meetings. Send children’s work home on a regular basis. Communicate using the home language of the parents.
• Take advantage of ongoing professional development opportunities relating to educating young children with special needs.

IMPLEMENTATION PITFALLS: Fully accounting for diversity in the early childhood classroom raises numerous potential problems. Among the most important are these:

• The "Fix-It" Paradigm. Some educators subscribe to the "fix-it" paradigm; they believe that special needs arising from diversity can and should be "fixed," and that only educational professionals can do so. These educators take a deficit viewpoint, which stresses what students lack, rather than accepting that all students are able to learn and determining how best to accomplish that goal. In this viewpoint, for example, a student who speaks a language other than English is seen as having a problem to be remedied by teaching the child English rather than as having an advantage to be maintained; for a child with disabilities, the emphasis is on what the child is unable to do rather than how he or she is capable and like other children. To remedy this viewpoint, teachers need to acknowledge and value children's differences and to build on their strengths.
  
• Pigeonholing. Well-meaning staff members may attempt to include information about diverse people in the curriculum, but by focusing on the differences between groups they actually perpetuate stereotypes and a "we-versus-them" mentality. For example, a teacher who introduces information and materials about Asian Americans may ignore the vast differences within the various Asian cultures in socioeconomic status, country of origin, and the nature and timing of their immigration to the United States. As a result, the teacher may present a stereotypical viewpoint. Knowledge and appreciation of various cultures as well as an emphasis on human similarities are essential in eliminating such pigeonholing in teachers' thoughts.
  
• Tourist Curriculum. A related pitfall for well-meaning teachers is implementing a "tourist" curriculum to meet multicultural and multiethnic goals. This approach is marked by trivializing, organizing activities only around holidays or food; tokenism, providing only one ethnic image in an otherwise white classroom culture; stereotyping, using images of other ethnic groups in the past and in traditional dress; and misrepresenting American ethnic groups by concentrating on life in foreign countries. This curriculum disconnects cultural diversity from daily classroom life by bringing it up only on special occasions, then having nothing further to do with the culture (Derman-Sparks & Anti-Bias Curriculum Task Force, 1989).
  
• Self-Fulfilling Prophecies. If teachers anticipate that students who do not speak English as their first language or who have a disability will not be able to keep up with other children, it is likely that their attitude toward and the way they treat such children in the classroom will make that expectation come true. To eliminate such self-fulfilling prophecies, teachers should demonstrate high expectations for all students.
  
• Misconceptions About Language Acquisition. Teachers who have misconceptions about language acquisition—believing that children learn a new language more easily, that all students use the same process to acquire language, or that children and adults go through the same stages in language acquisition—will not be able to accurately assess a child’s development. Provision of professional development will enable teachers to keep abreast of current research in language acquisition.
  
• Labeling. Labeling a student with disabilities or relying on a standard description of a particular disability may prevent a teacher from accurately assessing the student’s individual abilities. Such labeling also may hurt a child's self-esteem and cause teachers to lower their expectations for the child's achievement. Instead of labeling the child, the label can be placed on the program or service, such as "oral language development."
  
• Quick Fix. Schools will be unsuccessful if they attempt to address issues of diversity on a one-time or quick-fix basis. Instead, working with culturally and linguistically diverse families, children, and communities is a dynamic, ongoing process of learning and interacting that requires time, planning, and continued effort.