Becoming Culturally Relevant

"While the importance of culturally relevant ECE programs is a major theme in the field, too many early childhood programs continue to ground their environment, curriculum, teaching styles, and language in the dominant culture," challenge Louise Derman-Sparks, Debbie LeeKeenan, and John Nimmo in their new book, Leading Anti-Bias Early Childhood Programs: A Guide for Change. "Staff may act out societal power relationships of advantage and disadvantage and socially prevalent biases, even if they are not aware of what is happening.

"The dynamics of dominant-culture-centered early childhood programs push other viewpoints to the margins — even when the majority of families at the program come from other cultural backgrounds. This means that a large number of young children experience two differing cultural contexts every day. Worse, children may experience their home culture as invisible or inferior. When teachers use child development norms and criteria based on dominant group culture to judge the ability of children from other cultural groups, the teachers are hindered in seeing the actual developmental abilities and growth of many children. This dynamic automatically advantages children from the dominant culture group and disadvantages children from non-dominant groups."

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