Benefits and Examples of Exploring Diverse Cultures and Languages in Early Childhood

This article discusses the benefits and examples of exploring diverse cultures and languages in early childhood for 3 year old children. It emphasizes the importance of developing cultural competence and creating an inclusive learning environment. The article provides strategies for incorporating cultural diversity in the curriculum and offers tips for teaching and learning in a culturally sensitive manner. It also addresses how to respond to questions and incidents related to diversity and provides resources for further exploration.

Running head: LANGUAGE AND LITERACIES IN EARLY CHILDHOOD
Name of the Student
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Benefits and examples of exploring diverse cultures and languages in early childhood for 3
year old children.
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About this handbook
Diversity is a critical part of the contemporary society and unbeknownst to them, children
come across the experience of diversity from a very early age. This booklet is designed in
order to help early learning educators develop strategies for incorporating the understanding
of diversity in their curriculum. However, this booklet also serves the purpose of helping the
educators understand why this kind of an incorporation is important for the children.
The objective of this booklet is to strategically point out which aspects of early learning
education is in need of understanding the relevance and importance of cultural competence in
3 -4 year old children. The booklet aims to cover:
 A deeper understanding of cross cultural significance in early childhood.
 Appreciation of the ways early childhood education can incorporate cultural
competence building elements in their practices.

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Contents
Introduction................................................................................................................................3
Understanding Diversity and the EYLF.....................................................................................4
How to tune children to be culturally competent.......................................................................5
Building a learning environment................................................................................................6
Teaching and Learning Strategies..............................................................................................7
Questions and responses............................................................................................................8
Creativity in classroom strategies..............................................................................................9
Responsible interventions..........................................................................................................9

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Benefits and examples of exploring diverse cultures and languages in early childhood
for 3 year old children.
(Adams, 2018)
Introduction
Early childhood is considered one of those developmental phases where the social,
cultural, cognitive and linguistic skills develop the most. Like a soft dough that can be
moulded to give it any shape, children in early childhood are more prone to experiences that
will determine what path their development would take. For educators, therefore, it becomes
the responsibility to ensure that the development of children take a path that not only benefits
their development of relevant skills but also helps them understand a lot of other key aspects
that as humans, becomes important to understand in a multi-cultural society. Diversity of
cultures and languages is one of such aspects that needs to be explored in depth. Children’s
development of language and literacy through exploring diverse cultures and languages
within the classroom not only enhances their development and skill acquisition but also
ensures a steady growth and settlement into a lifestyle of mutual understanding, harmony and
respect.

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Understanding Diversity and the EYLF
Dealing with diversity in an early educational classroom context means to understand
primarily the differences that lie amongst the learners. Those differences can be in terms of
cultural background, linguistic identity, ethnicity or a mix of all of them. The necessity of
making children understand the aspect of cultural diversity form a crucial base for the
education of children as it allows to raise them to become culturally competent and sensitive.
The Early Years Learning Framework (EYLF) provides a series of practices and outcomes
that concerns the development of children in a culturally competent and equitable manner
(Margets & Raban-Bisby, 2011).
The Key links to Early Years Learning Framework (EYLF) concerning Cultural
Diversity are:
EYLF Principle 4. Respect for Diversity
EYLF Practice 5. Learning Environments
EYLF Practice 6. Cultural Competence
EYLF Outcome 1. : Children Have a Strong Sense of Identity
EYLF Outcome 2. : Children are Connected With and Contribute to their World

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How to tune children to be culturally competent
(Jessen-Howard, 2019)
It might sound difficult to incorporate a complex aspect like cultural diversity among
children as young as 3 years old. However, what needs to be remembered is that children in
this particular age group are naturally curious about their environment (Gordon & Browne,
2013, p. 14). They may realise that they are different from some people in the class or that
not everyone in the class look or speak in the same manner. Educators (as well as parents)
need to capitalise on this opportunity of children asking questions. Imagine a scenario where
you are faced with a question from one of the children at the centre who says “Jacob speaks
really weird English. Is he stupid?” what would you do in this case. Your response as an
educator while confronting these scenarios will determine how efficiently the children will
develop their cultural competence. As Kupetz (2008) describes, children around 3 years of
age start to observe noticeable human characteristics and physical differences among people
and subsequently ask questions. These questions arise simply out of curiosity and is not
meant to hurt or offend anyone. Therefore utilising these opportunities to send a respectful
and accurate message about each culture and their individual differences (Durand, 2010).

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Building a learning environment
Responding appropriately to the student is as important as establishing a learning
environment where children can learn and develop their cultural competence as well as grow
to understand diversity properly. Therefore building an appropriate and inclusive learning
environment should become the first priority for all educators (Davies et al., 2013).
As educators of early years’ children, we need to remember that children learn and
develop well when they are placed in the vicinity of other children of their same age.
Children are more active learners than adults and prefer to engage in play based learning.
Therefore that first strategy that needs to be followed is to build a learning environment
where inclusivity is promoted and all children get the opportunity to interact with each other
(Durand, 2010).
Ensure that there is enough space for the children to move around and play. There
should be ample toys, both educational and casual for the children to explore. At three years
of age, children are already on the verge of understanding and developing early literacy and
language skills. Therefore allowing them to merge their learning with a play based pedagogy
ensures a steady and appropriate deliverance of relevant content, ideas as well as values while
maintaining the aspect of inclusive learning (Ponciano & Shabazian, 2012).

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Teaching and Learning Strategies
(Tatter, 2019)
Once an appropriate learning environment has been established, it needs to be
understood firstly that the environment will have significant impact on the learning of the
children as it becomes the environment where the children will be raised in. Secondly,
children in the mentioned age group are at a stage where they will try to mimic and replicate
adult behaviour (Keengwe, 2010). Their ideas of what is good and what is bad or the
difference between right and wrong is heavily dependent upon the adult perceptions and
display of what is right and what is wrong. Cultural competence therefore can be developed
by primarily establishing a behavioural pattern that shows mutual love, respect and harmony
towards different cultures (Keengwe, 2010). According to Families NSW (2011), there are
very simple strategies that can be implemented in order to help the children embrace diversity
within an early learning setting. Some of those strategies are as follows:
a. Hang a big map in the classroom and ask the children to point out the location they
come from. Tag the points by a board pin, the child’s photograph and mention the

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country of origin. Use this as a resource to develop language and literacy skills by
promoting learning the names of different places.
b. Each week, take up a different country and use the opportunity to invite the parents to
share something pertaining to their culture. They can share anything ranging from
traditional songs and music, dance, language, food as well as costumes.
c. Identify and embrace cultural diversity by celebrating culturally diverse calendar
events throughout the year.
d. Build resources that are multilingual and multicultural and use them in the classroom
with the children to effectively develop language and literacy skills of the children.
Questions and responses
As mentioned earlier, when a child in an early learning environment is asking a
question, s/he is asking because of the curiosity generated by observation. There is no
malicious or discriminatory intent involved in the questioning. Therefore the responses
should also be particular about explaining the reason behind the child’s observation.
Developing cultural awareness through question and response entails two aspects, firstly to
acknowledge that the child’s question is valid and based upon a genuine observation and
secondly the response should appropriately foster awareness towards an accepting and
respectful attitude (Sylva et al., 2010).
Going back to the example question, if a child asks “Jacob speaks really weird
English. Is he stupid?”, by ensuring that the two aspects as mentioned above are
implemented, a proper response to the question would be something like this:
“Yes it is true that Jacob cannot speak very god English. But that is not because he is
stupid. In fact he is very intelligent. The reason why he does not speak very good English is
because unlike you and me, Jacob does not speak English at home. Like English is the
mother tongue for you and me, Jacob’s mother tongue is Spanish. This is why he speaks so

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good Spanish and we cannot. Not being able to speak the language we speak is just one way
of stating that a person is from a different place and speaks a different language. Do you
want to speak a different language too? In that case, if you help Jacob learn and speak
English, Maybe Jacob will also help you speak good Spanish ”.
We can see that the response has acknowledged the child’s question and respectfully
explained why the linguistic difference is so prevalent. This in turn also generates a natural
response towards wanting to learn a new language, which can be used to effectively develop
linguistic and literacy skills in children.
Creativity in classroom strategies
A big part of developing cultural competence will rely on individually responding to
children’s questions. However, that can be made into an effective learning strategy by asking
curious and creative questions back to the children. Questions based on skin colour for
example can be routed into a thinking activity by asking the child to introspect and answer
her own question. For example, if a child asks “Why is Martin’s skin black and not white like
us?”, the most effective way of rerouting the question would be to ask about the child’s
personal attributes like “Why is your hair brown and not blonde like Daisy?”. This would
lead the child to a series of introspective questioning which can be used to develop cross
cultural awareness.
Responsible interventions
Despite all strategies and methods implemented, we cannot overrule the fact that bias
– related incidents or discriminatory instances will occur in the classroom. In order to deal
with them efficiently, the educators must approach the incidents with sufficient care. Teasing
or name calling can be identified as the most prominent behaviour that can be observed in the
classroom. In such instances, take your time and deal with the issue in a calm and non-

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aggressive manner. Explain to the child that this kind of a behaviour is not desirable and hurts
the other person. Therefore they should not be committing such behaviour. At the same time,
ensure that this kind of practices are also discouraged at homes by organising meetings with
parents and specifically highlighting that they should discourage discriminatory behaviour in
homes as well by calmly teaching the child to discontinue such acts (Clark, 2010).
(Fortman, 2014)

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References
Adams, A. (2018). Diversity: You Keep Using That Word. I Do Not Think It Means What You
Think It Means [Image]. Retrieved from
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think-means/
Clark, A. (2010). Transforming children's spaces: Children's and adults' participation in
designing learning environments. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203857588
Davies, D., Jindal-Snape, D., Collier, C., Digby, R., Hay, P., & Howe, A. (2013). Creative
learning environments in education—A systematic literature review. Thinking skills
and creativity, 8, 80-91. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tsc.2012.07.004
Durand, T. M. (2010). Celebrating diversity in early care and education settings: Moving
beyond the margins. Early Child Development and Care, 180(7), 835-848.
https://doi.org/10.1080/03004430802466226
Families, NSW (2011) Celebrating Cultural Diversity in Early Childhood Services Retrieved
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practice-tipsheet-2.pdf
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Keengwe, J. (2010). Fostering cross cultural competence in preservice teachers through
multicultural education experiences. Early Childhood Education Journal, 38(3), 197-
204. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10643-010-0401-5
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