I’ve always loved to learn about other cultures. My fondest memory of elementary school is a Mexican posada procession and fiesta. My favorite thing about my children’s preschool was that they celebrated Diwali, Hanukkah, Christmas, Eid al-Fitr, Purim and more.
As a preschool teacher myself, I was eager to expose my students to other holidays, cultures, etc. I posted pictures of people in different national costumes and different types of homes.
Imagine my shock when I went to a to a teachers’ workshop on diversity and the speaker warned us against overemphasizing different and unusual things about countries and told us that with very young children, it’s better to start with things connected to their real life.
I gradually began to see the speaker’s point. As much as I love colorful celebrations and unique things, it does risk a “tourist” approach which portrays people of other cultures as “exotic”. This ironically increases children’s perception that people from that culture are strange and different.
This doesn’t mean we can never celebrate a unique holiday. Indeed, it was appropriate to celebrate the holidays my children’s school did because there really were children or teachers of each of those faiths at the school. The children were learning about something important to someone they knew, from the children, parents and teachers who cared about it.
But we need to also be careful to talk about similarities between cultures. We also need to show people of different races and genders doing things typical of life in America today. We should be talking not just about people of color as people who live in other countries. When we do talk about other countries, we should show not only the traditions but how people live today.
What this means, basically, is that pictures of people who look like my daughters should not always depict them squatting in front of a thatched hut. (They do have thatched roof houses in Korea, as in my birth son’s ancestral Ireland for that matter.) There should also be pictures of people living in apartment buildings in Seoul, and even more importantly, pictures of Asian-Americans—working, caring for their kids, participating in the community.
Some of my favorite books for talking about differences with kids include All the Colors of the Earth by Sheila Hamanaka, The Colors of Us by Karen Katz, and the Sesame Street book We’re Different, We’re the Same by Bobbi Kates. A wonderful video series, available from the Culture for Kids catalog,is American Cultures for Children, which shows the history of how people of a certain ethnic group first came to this country, shows various kids and adults of that heritage in the U.S., if applicable shows areas such as Koreatown, Los Angeles or Chinatown, New York City, and also shows some of the traditional crafts, stories and music of that culture. Available videos in the series, hosted by actress Phylicia Rashad, include Mexican, Korean, Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Central American, Irish, Italian, Arab, and more.
Please see these related blogs:
Can We Ever Just Appear Without Being Explained?
Care of African-American Children in Transracial Adoptions: Different Skin Colors