Parents and teachers perceptions of the effectiveness of Equality Practice for children from culturally diverse background: Examining Perception of equality practice in Early Year Education

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Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION1

Social Context of the Research1

What Does Inclusion and Diversity Mean and why does it Matter?3

Statement of Research Questions5

Aims of the research6

LITERATURE REVIEW7

Constructing Social Identities in the Classroom7

Legislation and Policy7

Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS)8

Recommendations from the Office for Standards in Education (OFSTED)10

Working with Parents11

Subordinated Social Identities in the Classroom: Multicultural Education12

Subordinated Identities and Ideological Oppression14

Empowerment through Critical Multicultural Classrooms14

Empowerment and Social Change within the Classroom15

Parent Involvement16

REFERENCES17

Introduction

Social Context of the Research “We all live in different rooms, with different fixtures, different things that make our room our room. Yet together, we all live in the same house and we must learn how to live in that house as one.” (Childs, 2003, p. 34)

Learning how to live with people from different communities and countries and with different histories, customs, and languages is often absent from today's public school curriculum. At a time when the world becomes increasingly multicultural, our classrooms have remained stagnant environments where dominant narratives construct U.S. history, devoid of the histories and experiences of other social groups. It is this gap that must be transformed so classrooms become spaces where children can learn to become agents of social change. As educators and scholars have indicated (Banks, 1995; Giroux, 2003), the classroom is an opportunity for students to learn about race, ethnicity, gender, class, language, as well as how social, historical and political contexts construct these social identities.

As children become aware of their race, ethnicity, class and gender identities at the age of four (Ramsey, 1991; Sani &: Bennett, 2004) and begin to develop feelings of prejudice and discrimination as young as five (Sani &: Bennett, 2004, p. 77), studying the construction of these identities in the context of a first grade classroom is important to developing a more integrative multicultural curriculum. Moreover, there is a dearth of studies that examine how a critical consciousness can be developed in young children through a multicultural curriculum that incorporates subordinated social identities and social context. In this dissertation, I will illustrate how current multicultural teaching methods construct subordinated social identities in a manner that “Others” these groups, rather than provides a true integration of difference.

Between age of three and eighteen, children will spend 9000 hours in formal schooling. The age and length of time spent by a child inside the classroom makes the context of schools an important area of exploration for understanding the socialization of children (Tatum, 2008, p. 381). Previous research (Killen &: Stangor, 2001; Langhout, 2005; Valenzuela, 1999) has shown the influence that schools have in shaping students' perceptions of race, ethnicity, gender and class. Often, schools privilege particular groups and dominant cultural narratives rather than the experiences of people from subordinated groups. For example, schools can teach children gender roles and expectations, can contextualise the social histories of racial groups, can validate what is important cultural knowledge to learn and appropriate “tongues” to speak, ...