Early year practitioners have the responsibility of providing a rich as well as a stimulating environment for the different young learners. They are the professionals who are responsible for the planning different challenging as well as fun activities that help the children in developing physically, intellectually and even emotionally (Entwistle 2018). At the same time, they also have the responsibility of providing a safe and supportive environment that helps them to grow as a better human being from all aspects of life. United Kingdom had been the host of various types of cultures where people from different types of backgrounds are living happily and successfully in their own professional and personal lives. Therefore, children from all these families not only need to develop a feeling that they are safe in the nation and that their culture is respected and loved, all the children need to learn being open towards other culture. One of the biggest responsibilities for the professionals is to develop an environment that would ensure inclusivity and diversity for children in their early years (Bartlett et al. 2016). The theme of the portfolio would be “promoting a safe environment that ensures inclusivity and diversity within the early year’s arena” and would be shedding more light about how to provide a safe environment to the children of early years.
There are some guiding principles of the Early Years foundation strategy policy that would guide the actions of the practitioners so that they could provide the best growing moments to the children ensuring them the potential to develop as a worthy human being. The EYFS guides that every child is unique who is learning and should be resilient, confident, capable as well as self-assured. The practitioners should give them the scope to be strong as well as independent through positive relationships. The third of the most important guiding principle is that children should learn and develop in enabling environments. Here, the experiences should be reflecting and responding to their personal needs. There should be a strong partnership between parents as well as the practitioners to ensure that such safe and enabling environment is provided to the children during their growing years.
One of the contemporary concerns that the early year practitioners as well as the family members are facing is raining their children to be culturally competent as well as sensitive to their young age. Often the children get the scopes of interaction with others from background and culture that is different from their own in different spheres of their regular interaction. Therefore, they need to learn different ways by which they would be respecting and accepting the differences (Caldwell 2017). Researchers are of the opinion that otherwise, such children may develop the risk for growing up into the adults who would be contributors to the problems brought out by stigmatization, discrimination as well as cultural insensitivity. Therefore, by helping the children to learn about cultural competency, one can hope to have a society that would be based on mutual respect, affection and acceptance (Kale and Luke 2017).
Under the section 1 of the policy, specifically under point 1.5., the policy makers have stated the importance of personal, social as well as emotional development of children. They have stated that it is extremely important for the professionals to help children for development of positive sense of themselves as well as others. The children should learn to form positive relationships and develop respect for others irrespective of their backgrounds, races, religions and cultures. They should be developing social skills and learn effective ways for management of their feelings. It is important for practitioners also to understand proper behavior in the groups and have the confidence in their own abilities. It often becomes important for the practitioner to respond to the different confronting statement that the children may have regarding the culture and diversity of others when they find that their friends are not similar in behavior, language or activities like they themselves are. Researchers are of the opinion that children are naturally curious about the different people surrounding them and they try to formulate a sense of their own identity mainly by undertaking the procedure of defining what makes them different from everyone else (Ansari and Crosnoe 2015). Therefore, there remain high chances that children will typically enquire about the questions about different types of observable characteristics like that of skin color, or accent or dresses or manners.
Researchers have revealed that when children are about the age of two or three, they first start noticing about physical differences among different people. It should however be noted that such most of the time, these questions are innocent and they never remain motivated by any form of intention of offending or hurting anyone. Therefore, it remains a huge responsibility of the practitioners or that of the parents to use such opportunities for sending a fair as well as accurate message about each of the culture. These would help the children in learning the fact that differences in culture and diversity only make a person unique but not inferior in nay forms (Clark 2015). The professionals have the responsibility to ensure the actions, behaviors and attitudes of different children of the different backgrounds and note their patterns of queries and questions about the differences in cultures and other aspects of the society. This should be considered as the opportunity where they need to find out and implement proactive ways for fostering cultural competence. In such scenarios, the practitioners would be maximizing the potential for learning mainly by helping the children of the of this age to see each of the cultural encounter as an enriching experience. The real foundation of the equality is based on the procedure of intercultural interaction and contact between people from different cultural backgrounds and even readiness to be learning from one another (Britto et al. 2017).
The EYFS has put forward a section in the policy called the “Understanding of the world” that mainly comprises of three important sections that are people and communities, the world and the technology. Here the practitioners should provide importance to the past as well as present events in their lives and in the lives of family members. They become aware that children do not enjoy similar things and are sensitive to this. They come to understand the similarities and dissimilarities among themselves and among traditions, communities and families. Researchers are of the opinion that it is very important of the patients and the practitioners to understand the impact of the environment where the children are raised. This should include own culture of the children, their families, educational as well as social settings and consideration of these factors are extremely important for both the parents and the practitioners as they need to work collaboratively for actively preventing the development of biasness in young children. Therefore, one of the most important action is that the key adults of the children’s life like that of the practitioners as well as the patients to be sensitive t the fact that the young children are active observers of their behaviors of all types that include bad as well as good (Benjamin et al. 2017). They are seen to develop their concepts of right or wrong according to what the adults around them are saying and doing. They are seen to follow and take these behaviors and attitudes of the adults as cues for their social experiments and norms. Therefore, researchers have recommended that practitioners need to find numerous opportunities that will help in displaying different forms of desirable behaviors. In the professional field, the practitioners need to find different types of ways for the children to become familiar with as well as help them to understand the diversities and if possible the children should be also given the scope to experience joy from difference.
Tolerance, cultural sensitivity, cultural competency, knowledge and similar other aspects can be inculcated in the children with the help of different types of initiatives that can be undertaken by the practitioners (Pellegrini and Galda 2017). The practitioners can make a point by acknowledging where the different children coming from different backgrounds who are allocated in groups by hanging a map. This should be then followed by tagging all the locations with the name of the child along with their country of origin. The practitioners should be also displaying a country in each of the week or the month and thereby take the opportunities of inviting parents as well as to share their phrases or words from their own languages, music, food, traditional dance as well as costumes. This is appropriate from age 4 to 8.
Although children above the age 8 can be given, project or can be participated in discussion sessions to gather knowledge on cultures. Moreover, the professionals should be also taking initiatives for celebrating culturally diverse calendar events throughout the years. This is appropriate for children of all age. Moreover, the professionals also need to display as well as make accessible multicultural and multilingual resources for the better understanding of the children regarding other cultures (Ballard 2016). One of the most important risks that can be seen here is the discussion of some of the traditions of some cultures that might offend other cultures resulting in disappointment and development of distance among the children. Therefore, professionals should be very careful about the points that need to be discussed in every culture and prevent discussions of sensitive practices and traditions in any culture.
The Department for Children, Schools and Families was created in the year 2007. This is mainly guided by the Children’s Plan: Building Brighter Futures. It has placed schools on the duty for promoting community cohesion in addition to diversity, equity as well as human rights. Besides, taking appropriate initiatives to develop broadness and openness about the tolerance for other cultures, the professionals also have to remain open to different queries and questions of the patients. Researchers are of the opinion that when the professionals would be confronted, they would need to discuss the facts openly with the children and acknowledge the differences helping the children to look at the better parts of these differences. When a child points out that another child or a person is different, that child is only disclosing an observation but is not making malicious statements (Fazel et al. 2017).
It is very important for the professionals to be always ready with a response that would mainly be including three important elements. Firstly, the response given by the professionals would be acknowledging that the observations are valid. Secondly, the responses of the professionals would be explaining the reasons behind the observations. Finally, the response that would be given by the practitioners should be such that it would help in fostering awareness among the children towards a more respectful as well as the accepting attitude. The researchers also advice the professionals to use creative means, which would help in encouraging the children for reflecting their own behaviors. This should be explained with the help of an example. When one of the children asks that whether the skin color of another child is black because she is dirty and does not take birth, the professional would provide answers that young logic of the children can process. To this, the professional might reply with an example to the child stating that his hair is brown to that of another blonde haired child and in similar way; the color of the body of one child is different from others. Following this, their professional would help in understanding the principles of diversity, effect of climate and others and explaining not due to any unhygienic issues. This would help the child to relate much simply and this help in removing stigma attached to being dark colored (Gerritsen et al. 2016). The practitioners would be responsibly intervening in situations when any form of bias-related incidents occurring at home or even in the classrooms. Moreover, the professionals would be equipping the children with the techniques that would help in enabling them for responding appropriately when they would be experiencing as well as witnessing discriminatory behaviors. The professionals also need to be strategic enough to develop an environment where children would learn to respect other cultures and they become confident about themselves and evolve to be better human beings (Hyson and Tomlinson 2014).
The Race Relations Amendment Act (2000) states “requires [local authorities] to eliminate discrimination and promote equal opportunities, as well as develop race equality policies in a proactive rather than a reactive way, as had previously been the case”. Helping the children to develop ideas about the aspects of the culture and encouraging them to respect for cultural diversity, practitioners are contributing to a number of benefits for the children in the nation. Children would be able to learn about their cultural background and this would help them to develop a strong sense of self-identity. The children would be also able to learn about and thereby appreciate the cultural preferences, inhibitions and traditions other than their own culture. The children also starts enjoying and respecting the differences and thereby recognizing the different universal characteristics that all share (Connors 2016). The children also come to develop concepts about racial prejudices and learn to understand why it should be challenged.
From the entire discussion, it becomes clear that supporting a child’s best possible physical, social, cognitive and emotional development in the early days helps in establishing a good foundation for their success as well as well-being in their later lives. This also results in stable mental health and well-being. Children are seen to develop their concepts about the world through their relationships, experiences, observations, queries and feelings. A supportive and a safe environment will help the child to develop positive as well as secure self-concept by fostering in them a sense of belonging and inclusion. It is very important for the children to develop openness and tolerance about the different cultures of the people they meet and hence it come upon the professionals as the duty. The professionals should take up initiatives that would help in fostering cultural sensitivity, cultural knowledge and cultural competence in the child by overcoming biasness, creating a foundation in the children based on openness and acceptance for all cultures would help them to succeed further in life.
References:
Ansari, A. and Crosnoe, R., 2015. Children’s elicitation of changes in parenting during the early childhood years. Early childhood research quarterly, 32, pp.139-149.
Ballard, K., 2016. Children and disability: Special or included. Waikato Journal of Education, 10(1).
Bartlett, S., Hart, R., Satterthwaite, D., de la Barra, X. and Missair, A., 2016. Cities for children: children’s rights, poverty and urban management. Routledge.
Benjamin, T.E., Lucas-Thompson, R.G., Little, L.M., Davies, P.L. and Khetani, M.A., 2017. Participation in early childhood educational environments for young children with and without developmental disabilities and delays: a mixed methods study. Physical & occupational therapy in pediatrics, 37(1), pp.87-107.
Britto, P.R., Lye, S.J., Proulx, K., Yousafzai, A.K., Matthews, S.G., Vaivada, T., Perez-Escamilla, R., Rao, N., Ip, P., Fernald, L.C. and MacMillan, H., 2017. Nurturing care: promoting early childhood development. The Lancet, 389(10064), pp.91-102.
Caldwell, B.M., 2017. The fourth dimension in early childhood education. In Early Formal Education (pp. 71-81). Routledge.
Clark, R.M., 2015. Family life and school achievement: Why poor black children succeed or fail. University of Chicago Press.
Connors, M.C., 2016. Creating cultures of learning: A theoretical model of effective early care and education policy. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 36, pp.32-45.
Entwisle, D.R., 2018. Children, schools, and inequality. Routledge.
Fazel, M. and Betancourt, T.S., 2017. Preventive mental health interventions for refugee children in high-income settings: a narrative review.
Gerritsen, S., Wall, C. and Morton, S., 2016. Child-care nutrition environments: results from a survey of policy and practice in New Zealand early childhood education services. Public health nutrition, 19(9), pp.1531-1542.
Hyson, M. and Tomlinson, H.B., 2014. The early years matter: Education, care, and the well-being of children, birth to 8. Teachers College Press.
Kale, J. and Luke, A., 2017. Learning through difference: Cultural practices in early childhood language socialisation. In One child, many worlds (pp. 11-29). Routledge.
Pellegrini, A. and Galda, L., 2017. The development of school-based literacy: A social ecological perspective. Routledge.
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