Bridging Cultures in Early Care and Education: A Training Module

Bridging Cultures in Early Care and Education: A Training Module is a resource designed to help pre-service and in-service early childhood educators, including infant-toddler caregivers, understand the role of culture in their programs. It is also intended for professionals who work with children and their families in a variety of other roles, such as social workers, special educators, and early interventionists, and for use in college courses focused on early childhood education and child development. Bridging Cultures in Early Care and Education: A Training Module explains and illustrates how early childhood educators can use the organizing concepts of individualism and collectivism as a means of understanding cultural conflict and difference. The concepts of individualism and collectivism have been shown to be highly useful in improving home-school understanding across cultures. Based on real-life examples of cultural dilemmas in early care and education settings, participants engage the concepts of individualism and collectivism to solve a variety of scenarios in a dynamic and engaging manner. • Chapter 1 introduces the Bridging Cultures for Early Care and Education approach, provides a brief history, and explains the training module. It presents the conceptual framework of individualism and collectivism, which is at the heart of the training. • Chapter 2 provides the information needed for a two-hour workshop, including a script and notes to the facilitator. The script is not meant to be read word for word. Rather, it is offered as a guide, based on a pilot-tested approach. Appendices at the end of the book contain transparency masters for the overheads referenced in the script, and masters for suggested handouts. • Chapter 3 offers ideas for augmenting the basic two-hour training by expanding it over a longer time period. It also identifies additional diversity resources that can complement the Bridging Cultures training. • Additional appendices include: 1) information about a study that describes the degree of individualism in various countries so that interested participants can identify relative individualism for a country where a family originates; 2) recommendations for optimal uses of the module; 3) data from training workshops where the Bridging Cultures—Early Care and Education module was pilot-tested; and 4) an annotated bibliography describing key ideas and concepts underlying Bridging Cultures—Early Care and Education training. This module originated as part of the Bridging Cultures Project at WestEd—a nonprofit research, development, and service agency working with education and other communities to promote excellence, achieve equity, and improve learning for children, youth, and adults.