Contextualizing Early Childhood Education in International Schools
Systemic Change
Goal 1
To reflect on child wellbeing and health beliefs between Western and Chinese contexts. In doing so, to examine policies and practices within schools and determine if they are reflective of the community or adhere to dominant discourses.
Within international schools, Western discourses, values and beliefs around child wellbeing, parenting and health can create deficit models of thinking regarding children and their families. Western theories of child rearing frame certain ideas and beliefs about cultural traditions and their connection to child rearing within certain cultural contexts. For example, Chinese parents may praise children following parental expectations, whereas European American parents might praise self-initiated behaviours (Chuang, 2009). These theories do not necessarily take into consideration parental beliefs and their goals for socialization (Pearson, 2003). When examining child rearing practices, it is important to be critical of forming global constructs of parenting styles that do not focus on context (Chuang and Su, 2009). Eating practices are another aspect that has strong historical and cultural influences. For example, grandparents are often the primary caregiver for feeding a grandchild and engage in physically feeding the child in an act called weifan. This practice is often used to ensure children get the maximum nutrition from foods and reduce the anxieties of grandparents about feelings of ensuring proper care of their grandchildren. This concern is also drawn from their own feelings of hunger during the Great Famine. This practice from a Western perspective may be seen as reducing independence in a child and when asked to eat independently in the school cause challenges or perceived deficits from educators without understanding the context of these practices.
This goal challenges the murky waters of Western discourses on wellbeing and health mixing with the communities values and norms of children. By engaging with and understanding the perceptions and values of the community, international schools can engage with and seek a growth-based approach to the communities we serve. By acknowledging, honouring and empowering family and child voice, identity and culture we can develop more democratic and mutually cohesive systems of education and emerge as a cohesive whole.
Bedtime routines portrayed in the media can often demonstrate a focus on Western practices and ideologies around appropriate routines. These routines however, are not representative of the Majority World and may not serve the communities many international schools are a part of. Schools run the risk of placing judgement on communities and their bedtime practices when their values, beliefs and suggestions to families regarding sleep are not based on the realities of the communities and their living circumstances. This video is a part of the critique used in Artifact 3. (Parents. (2012, December 19). How to Establish a Bedtime Routine With Your Baby [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zOYsCyrOz3I&ab_channel=Parents)
This collaborative art piece done by students to me represents the duality of tensions faced between Western and Chinese ideologies in an international school. If we stay near the black hole we are sucked into our own biases and beliefs. However, as we move away from the core, we can begin to mix, blend and slowly interplay and understand one another to be more cohesive as a school and community. These tensions arise when we examine practices of wellbeing including feeding practices, bedtime routines and child rearing as explored in the artifacts below. (N.Chignall, 2020. "shared with consent").