Welcoming Families from Around the World

 

I frequently find myself in the scenario of having the privilege of welcoming a child from a country and culture of which I know almost nothing.  In the past, I have inadvertently bulldozed over students' and families' cultural sensitivities until I was forcibly awakened to the fact that different cultures actually have different perspectives. When we began admitting many Korean families into our international school and conflict over handling of several discipline and interpersonal incidents began to increase, the school board sent me and another administrator to Korea to participate in a special Korean cultural exchange program.  The experience was phenomenal. Gently and gracefully, we were introduced to Korean values, age posturing, history, and culture.  It revolutionized the way I interacted with members of the Korean community and gave me a strong empathy for their perspectives.

In their book, Anti-bias Education for Young Children and Ourselves (Derman-Sparks, Edwards, & Goins, 2020), the authors advise,

                When you honor all children’s cultural identities and incorporate them into the

daily life of your program, children come to understand that they are safe and welcome—just

 the way they are. When you value cultural differences while

appreciating the similarities everyone shares as human beings, you create a

foundation for children to thrive in a culturally complex world. To effectively

support children’s and families’ cultural identities, teachers need to strengthen

their understanding of the characteristics of culture (p.116).

With this in mind, if a new student was coming into my kindergarten from a country I was not familiar with, such as Kurdistan, I would immediately do a search online to find any information about the type of government, current political situation, some history, and religion.  I would reach out to members of the community who have traveled to Kurdistan to ask them their understanding of cultural practices, taboos, appropriate greetings for every age posture, and inappropriate body language. I would prepare the staff with the information as well.  The school would already display the flags of every different nationality represented in the school, so we would gather the students to officially add another one and teach them how to say hello to the student in Kurdish so they could greet him when he arrived. Most importantly, before the child came to the school, I would sit with the family and try to explain how we greet people, what the expectations are for the parents regarding meetings, visiting, sending food, etc.  I would encourage the teacher to meet the family, greeting them with a hello in Kurdish. 

I would hope that this would open the soil of the hearts of the current students and the incoming student for a healthy friendship to bloom. I would hope the children and teachers would embrace the child as interesting and accept him instead of seeing him as different and reject him.  I hope it would help the new student to relax and feel comfortable in the learning space.

Derman-Sparks, L., Edwards, J. O., & Goins, C. (2020). Anti-bias education for young children and ourselves. (2^nd ed.)  Washington, DC: National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC).