(Unit 4) Topic 1: Cultural Competency and Responsiveness

3 Clock Hours of Early Childhood Education

Interacting with Children Respectfully

Topic 1 Page 13

Recommended Video: A Class Divided, Frontline

Synopsis: The day after Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed, a teacher in a small town in Iowa tried a daring classroom experiment. She decided to treat children with blue eyes as superior to children with brown eyes. FRONTLINE explores what those children learned about discrimination and how it still affects them today.

In early childhood programs, you are going to be working with children who are unlike anyone else in the world.

Each of them has a unique history, personality, perspective, family, culture, set of challenges, and abundance of gifts.

Each of them deserves respect and genuine care from you. This will be easy in your work with some children, and difficult with others, and this variety is not just about the children, themselves, but about the way your personality and each of theirs interacts. If you work in a large site, you may find that a child who pushes all your buttons actually has a natural rapport with another teacher at your site. Interpersonal relationships between people of any age are complicated. Yet your job is to ensure that you treat all children with respect, and do not show either favoritism or animosity, in words or actions, towards any one child.

Treating children fairly does not mean that you treat them all the same. Realizing that some of your children are short, while others are tall, you might provide a step stool at the drinking fountain for the shorter children. You provide nothing extra for those who are tall. This is not favoritism for short children. This is fairness, because with the step stool, all of your children can get a drink independently. This example is less complicated than most of the situations you will encounter with children.