Early Childhood Multicultural Education

Growth and Development of the Field

Over the past 5 decades, the purpose of early childhood multicultural education has shifted from surface portrayals of cultural diversity to deeper analyses of power and oppression. Because early childhood curriculum is built largely on stories, arts and crafts, and music, initial multicultural efforts emphasized holidays, foods, and arts and crafts of disparate cultures. This approach was reinforced by the influx of commercial “multicultural” products—stories, dolls, plastic foods, posters, puzzles—that depict different racial groups and cultural practices in varying degrees of authenticity. In their 1989 text, Anti-Bias Curriculum: Tools for Empowering Young Children, Louise Derman-Sparks and colleagues boldly criticized these efforts as “tourist curricula.” They advocated shifting from the focus on cultural diversity to an antibias approach that embodies a critique of discrimination in all its forms—race, social class, gender, sexual preference, and abilities—and engagement in social activism to respond to these injustices. This broader definition and critical stance had a profound effect on early childhood multicultural education, and teachers and teacher educators in many countries recast their work as antibias teaching.

This shift in emphasis coincided with the emergence of critical race theory, which focuses on how racially based stratification and inequities affect [Page 736]individuals and groups. This theory gave rise to a number of observational and interview studies that showed that White children often made derogatory comments about images of unfamiliar groups and imposed subordinate roles on their classmates of color. Thus, supporting children to become aware of White privilege and to develop antiracist identities became another goal of early childhood multicultural education.

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