Analyzing Barriers to Communication

EDUC6358: Strategies for Working with Diverse Children “Partnering with Families”

Program Transcript

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NARRATOR: In this program early childhood educators Leslie Cheung and Eric Hoffman share their professional experiences and insights with regard to fostering partnerships with families, in order to help all young children thrive.

LESLIE CHEUNG: When working with families, and building partnerships with families, it is extremely important that we honor their walk of life, their culture, where they come from. Did they come from another country and immigrate here? How did they reach our borders, and bring their children? And why have they come here? In order to allow survival, to progress, to build a better life for their children?

So in partnering with families, we find mutual ground. And mutual ground goes beyond culture. It goes beyond social economic norms, or abnormalities as people might want to look at it, but we see each other as human beings. We're able to relate to each other, and that's how we build community. And in building community, we strengthen that village. That village that we have for children, that we know so well is necessary. That a child can't necessarily be raised by just one thought form, or one way, but to experience the whole. And when they experience the whole, then it enriches their life.

So as they move into their adulthood they have these experiences of, this was my preschool years. This was a formal memory that I had of my teacher, and how my teacher related to my mother. Because my mother came here from Mexico and she was picking strawberries. And my five brothers and sisters, we slept in one bed together. And this is how my life started in my culture, and as my being. And how that grows for this child.

Because what you've done in this partnership, is that you have allowed this child to not just be a whole child. But you have allowed this family to be a whole family. And in honoring that piece of culture, that diversity that might not be your own, you learn a lesson. You learn that every walk of life has its own flavor, it has its own color, it smells different. And when you can bring that in, you've enriched not only your own life, but that compassion has now been trickled down to your classroom. And trickled down to the children. And when you have those pieces, then it grows. It's like the pebble in the pond. And that's how we build peace on the planet.

ERIC HOFFMAN: I really want to bring families into the classroom. When they start in my classroom, I want them to feel like they're partners in their children's education. I want to feel like they have some power in the classroom. And I try to use a variety of ways to do that. I want them to come in and I want to listen to them, I don't want to talk to them as if I'm the expert about what they're going to do. Because that really turns people off, and makes them feel unwelcome. I want to listen to them to hear some clues about what I can include about their child in my classroom.

I'm an expert, and have a lot of experience, with young children. But families are experts in their own children. I don't know them, and I want them to bring me that information. So maybe they're going to tell me about a particular book that their child loves, or a routine or a song. Maybe something that they like to do, an activity or art materials. I'm going to try to bring that into the curriculum, maybe I'll add a food from their, to the menu, from their home. I want to be able to go to families and say, look this is what I heard from you and this is what I did. Do you think it's going to work for your child? And build up this relationship where they feel like they have some power in

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the classroom, and that we're partners in creating this curriculum and creating the routines. And I don't do it every year the same way, because the group changes.

So I want families-- I want to form a trusting relationship with them. And that can be tricky for a lot of reasons. Some families come in and they are thinking that I'm a baby sitter and they're going to tell me exactly what to do. But more often families come in, and they've had oftentimes some bad experiences with schools. They don't trust the big institutions. Even the smallest school can come across as a big institution. And so they're very reluctant to share, they maybe have had some bad experiences with teachers growing up or as parents. And so as the professional, it's my job to get some trust building.

And the way to do that is with really authentic listening, by showing respect, by building trust. And when I talk about authentic listening, it's not just listening kind of halfheartedly to what they're saying, I'm trying to understand what are the values behind what they're telling me. What are the ideas that are really going to connect us, to that family. And so to go back to them and say, I heard you and I built this into the curriculum, is a really powerful thing for many families. It's an experience that many of them have never had before. And I want to use that to build on the curriculum.

So building trust, respect, authentic listening. There's always going to be differences of opinion. And so this gets tested when the family thinks one way, maybe the school has a different value, and that's where I need to listen carefully and help the family and the school figure out something that works. A solution that works through the problem. A lot of times it involves taking a step back and say, well what are the values that we agree on.

Let me give you an example of that. I had a family, a mother came in who heard another child, not her own child but another child, swearing in the classroom. Now as a long time teacher I know that children do that for a lot of different reasons. And it's not that I want children to swear in my classroom, but it's something I expect to have happen for part of the year. She was quite upset about it, and her reaction was that if her child swore in the classroom I should slap her child's face. Now obviously I'm not going to do that. But I didn't jump in and say, you're wrong. You know this is what we do, this is why children swear. I really wanted to listen to what her ideas were, and to find out what are the values behind that. And what we came to, was that we could agree that we both wanted her child to grow up to respect all the people, to be aware of other people's feelings. And I talked to some of the things we did in the classroom to help with that, and some of the things that she did at home to help with that. And she recognizes that there was no way I was ever going to hit her child. His family had a very strong value, that he should not swear whether it was home or at school. And that I would tell that to the child.

A couple weeks later the parent came back and said, you know I've been really thinking about our conversation and I really thought about my older child who's doing a lot of swearing. And what it really came down to was that she was very concerned about her older child's swearing, and concerned that her child was on a path that was going to lead that child into getting involved in gangs. And so we had a much fuller discussion because I was able to listen more carefully. And because I was willing to listen to her, she was willing to listen to my ideas about swearing as well. And it changed the way that she responded to that.

So that's my goal is to create that kind of trust going. The other piece is that families can give me information about me as well, if I develop that trust. So you know, I have biases and ideas that I'm not even aware of, right. We all have those. And I've had families say, for example an African American family. The mother said, Eric I don't think you realize but you talk to black children different from the way you talk to white children. I had no idea, I wouldn't have guessed that in a million years. But once she pointed it out to me, it was totally obvious to me. And it really got me

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to change, or at least work to change my behavior. She trusted enough to bring that information to me, and to know that I wasn't going to react in a way that tried to be too defensive and things like that.

So the information goes both ways if I can get that trusting relationship going. One of the biggest challenges I had with parents was teaching in a co-op program, where I was running the parent co-op. And it was for a graduate student family housing at a large university. And most of the children were foreign born, and about 1/3 of the children didn't speak any English. And many of the mothers who came to work in the classroom didn't. So a number of the families came to the classroom expecting to find a nun, and rows of desks, and reading lessons, and they got me and a pretty open classroom. So it took quite some time to establish some trusting relationships there. It's one of those experiences I wish I could do again, knowing what I know now, in terms of incorporating all the different cultures into the classroom. It was interesting because the children had no problem playing with each other, and communicating with each other, but a lot of the families had trouble. And so it was really a good experience for me in helping families connect as well. To get families to trust each other. So it was not just me and each individual family, but trying to create that group feeling that made the classroom work.

If I could advise people of anything, is to know that you're going to make mistakes. That not every family is going to respond. And you can't take all of that personally. You just have to keep working and do your best. And some families you'll never know why they are not relating to you. Some families are very private, some families come from cultures that are very private. Some families have had such negative responses from institutions that they're just not willing to bring in anything of their private life, anything of their family life. But I find that over the course of the year I can usually establish some kind of trust with each family.

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