The Role of Cultural Development in the EYFS Curriculum - Essay Example

Part 2: The Role of Cultural Development in the EYFS Curriculum The Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) Education plays a crucial role in the spiritual, moral, social and cultural development of children. It is therefore imperative that the EYFS curriculum is competent enough to bring about long lasting spiritual, moral, social and cultural values in the young minds. Children during the early years of their foundation studies are most likely to imbibe the cultural values for their life time and most of the things that children learn during nursery period are likely to leave long lasting impressions on their personality-social, cultural, moral and spiritual outlooks regarding life and society. Education for citizenship has been one of the major goals of education, and for a child to be developed as a responsible and socially committed citizen the curriculum at the EYFS need to be designed so carefully with far fetched visions. Such a curriculum should both be short and long term goal oriented and should have its foundations in strong cultural and moral values. There should be provisions in the EYFS curriculum to accommodate all the sorts of SMSC development, and schools and teachers need to pay special attention in bringing about desirable changes in the lives of learners through the effective implementation of the set policies and strategies with regard to EYFS education. The early education stage is the most productive formative stage in the educational life of each learner and therefore this paper analyses the EYFS curriculum of the nation with special reference to the provision for SMSC development in it. One needs to have a thorough understanding of the four underlying principles based on which the EYFS curriculum are framed. They are: “Every child is a competent learner from birth, who can be resilient, capable, confident and self-assured”, “children learn to be strong and independent from a base of loving and secure relationships with parents and/or a key person”; “the environment plays a key role in supporting and extending children’s development and learning” and “children develop and learn in different ways and at different rates and all areas of learning and development are equally important and inter-connected” (The EYFS principles: a breakdown). Practitioners and teachers who serve at the early foundation stage of learners should be aware of these underlying principles and in designing class room activities and learning experiences for the children all these key aspects of EYFS need to be given priority. The professional competency and knowledge of the learning psychology of the practitioners are very much significant in FS education. Practitioners should realize that every child is unique with different cultural and social environment, having manifold ‘strengths, interests, preferences and different developmental pathways’. The practitioner needs to have an in depth understanding of both the physical and emotional environment of the learners and for this he/she needs to observe, listen and build a good rapport with the learners. Children should have trust and confidence in the teacher; they should be free to open up their minds and share their feelings, perceptions and impressions to the practitioner. The practitioner also needs to keep in mind that “young children learn best through carefully planned, play based experiences that start with their strengths, interests and capabilities. It acknowledges that young children are active learners and that they need opportunities to explore and make sense of the world, supported by knowledgeable, interested and sensitive adults” (The EYFS principles: a breakdown). It should also be borne in mind that all areas of learning are interconnected and therefore students are to be offered all sorts of opportunities to practice and apply whatever they have learnt in and outside the class room or nursery. The EYFS education has undergone drastic changes in the past few decades. Today, the major sex areas that the nursery education focuses include personal, social and emotional development; communication, language and literacy; problem solving, reasoning and numeracy; knowledge and understanding of the world; physical development and creative development (Introducing the EYFS to parents and carers). The major aims of EYFS are to ensure that no child is left behind and all are offered equality of opportunity; EYFS also make provisions for continuous assessment, improving quality and consistency through inspection and regulation regime and through constant interaction with parents and the professionals involved in the teaching learning process (Introducing the EYFS to parents and carers). The Educational Reform Act 1988 underlines the importance of SMSC development in the school curriculum. As the Act states the curriculum of early education schools should promote “the spiritual, moral, cultural, mental and physical development of pupils at the school and of society”; and should prepare “pupils for the opportunities, responsibilities and experiences of adult life” (Promoting and evaluating pupils’ spiritual, moral, social and cultural development 2004 p. 6). Each school should have a set of guidelines or codes to ensure that the children are not discriminated against and that there are effective measures and strategies to promote healthy race relations among pupils. Personal, social and emotional development of children is a major concern with regard to FS education of children. Children need to develop a positive self esteem from their early life onwards and for this they should be helped to “embrace differences in gender, ethnicity, religion, special educational needs and disabilities” (Curriculum Guidance for the Foundation Stage 2000 p. 28); for this they should be taught to celebrate and acknowledge differences and to develop anti-discriminatory attitudes. Children should be taught to believe in themselves-they should be taught to value their culture, gender, ethnicity and social backgrounds; on the other hand, early year foundation education should inculcate in their minds the fact that no culture is superior to the other. They should be trained to respect all cultures and acknowledge the cultural and social differences of their peers. In this respect, role plays, games and carefully controlled activities can offer children to explore their own cultures and to assimilate the cultural diversity of others. Responses are to be elicited after each such activity and “by sharing emotions and responses during activities and experiences, they develop sensitivity to the needs of others and begin to learn about the value of and need for trust, honesty, support and reliability” (Curriculum Guidance for the Foundation Stage 2000 p. 29). Children are to be allowed to mingle and work in groups freely irrespective of their ethnicity, colour or gender, and the genuine doubts and responses of the students are to be clarified clearly. For example there could be students who raise questions like “Why am I black whereas he/she is white?”, “Are whites better than Blacks”, “Why is it that his father has a job whereas my father does not have?” etc. In fact these questions are keys to enter into the emotional, social and cultural prejudices of the learners. There could also be responses like “he bullied me”, “she spoke ill of my mom”, or “my father says not to play with him” etc. The practitioner needs to provide timely care to these responses to the students so that he/she can turn them into positive learning outcomes. Proper care is to be taken to ensure that children are no longer moved by racial discrimination, social or cultural bias, ethnocentricity or culture shock. Learning best takes place when the learners are kept motivated, interested and engaged in experiences that fascinate them. While framing a curriculum for children in their early education, these aspects are to be taken into account. Adults have a pivotal role to play in the EYFS as the curriculum sees adults also as ‘critical partners in the learning process’ along with the children; there should be considerable changes in the attitudes, perceptions and value systems of the adults if the children are to maintain the new value system that contrast themselves with the value system of the adults with whom they are in proximity with. Children learn the first lessons in culture and social values from their homes and all those wrong concepts, social values and cultural prejudices they have intuitively acquired from the family need to be altered at the early education level itself. Thus, the process of cultural development among children during the early years need support, encouragement, feed backs and cooperation from the adults too; to conclude, “if adults are to model and ‘scaffold’ the skills that they would prize in their children – skills of enquiry, creativity and critical thinking, problem-solving, reasoning and conflict resolution – they must also have the capacity to embrace for themselves the risks and challenges that all new learning brings” (The EYFS principles: a breakdown). The practitioners should consider parents as partners in the educational process as “parents are children’s first and most enduring educators” and undoubtedly “when parents and practitioners work together in early years settings, the results have a positive impact on the child’s development and learning” (Promoting and evaluating pupils’ spiritual, moral, social and cultural development 2004 p. 9). Religious education and spiritual development of children is another concern with regard to SMSC development. With regard to the spiritual development of students, schools and the school curriculum is supposed to assist “individuals to make sense of these questions, and about what it does to help form pupils’ response to life and various forms of experience, or even to questions about the universe” (Spiritual, Moral, Social and Cultural Development: An Ofsted Discussion Paper. Ofsted, 1994. Page 8.). One must also keep in mind the fact that there is a direst link between the spiritual development of children and their educational development. It is considered that a “spiritual sense can be seen as a prerequisite for learning since it is the human spirit that motivates us to reach beyond ourselves and existing knowledge to search for explanations of existence. The human spirit engaged in a search for truth could be a definition of education, challenging young people to explore and develop their own spirituality and helping them in their own search for truth” (Education for Adult Life: The Spiritual and Moral Development of Young People. London, SCAA, 1996). It is also believed that children who develop strong sense of spirituality in their early education are most likely to develop “a set of values, principles and beliefs, which may or may not be religious, which inform their perspective on life and their patterns of behaviour”, and are likely to respect other peoples’ beliefs and tend to show empathetic feelings towards the peers (Promoting and evaluating pupils’ spiritual, moral, social and cultural development 2004 p.13). The moral development of students is closely linked to their spiritual and religious development. Children should have a thorough “understanding of society’s shared and agreed values” and it is the duty of teachers to inculcate moral values among the learners by engaging “pupils in thinking about their responsibilities when issues arise, such as keeping promises, telling the truth, or dealing with unfairness and injustice” (Promoting and evaluating pupils’ spiritual, moral, social and cultural development 2004 p. 15) The inculcation of moral values would also enable children to develop their attitudes regarding issues, modify their notion of right and wrong and improve their decision making abilities. In order to promote the moral values among students practitioners need to resort to a large amount of modeling, prevent all sorts of religious discrimination, reward expressions of moral behavioral patterns, and should prepare students to take responsibility for whatever they so. As Ashton (2000) suggests “it is through study of the great religions of the world that pupils may be introduced to the great compendiums of wisdom which have been found, by many generations of people, to be supportive in times of stress, or when one is faced with the responsibility of making an important decision (p. 3). Conversing with children and eliciting responses and responding to them is the beat way to foster religious values among children. Children will be having a large number of doubts such as whether they will be reborn as animals or whether there are angels etc. It is important that these genuine doubts of children are cleared at the earliest. As Ashton (2000) puts it: “Young children, not surprisingly, frequently confuse angels and fairies-both are usually shown with wings. If the confusion is not cleared up at an early stage of their education, it is likely to persist for many years, leading to the rejection of the religious truths expressed by the symbolism out of hand, and on uniformed grounds” (p. 71) Social development is another major concern with regard to EYFS education and it in turn adds to the cultural development of learners. Children need to be taught how to interact with others and work in groups. EYFS should offer students the preliminary training to develop “skills and personal qualities necessary for living and working together” (Promoting and evaluating pupils’ spiritual, moral, social and cultural development 2004 p. 19). The EYES education also should see that children develop Knowledge and understanding of the world (KUW) and this is possible only through the social and cultural development of students; the ultimate aim should be to reduce the bridge between childrens experiences of home, with the setting and the world around them. Thus, it can be concluded that the EYFS education has a long way to go based on the current researches and studies in this regard. The early year’s foundation stage education is the most significant phase in the education process where proper and healthy cultural, social, religious and moral values can be instilled in the minds of children. However, there should be continuous evaluation, monitoring and assessment of the strategies and approaches employed in EYFS education. The SMSC guidance materials asks schools to consult the local community in establishing its over all aims by identifying key stage objectives, reviewing current practices, planning and implementing changes, monitoring and evaluating progress and recognizing and rewarding success (Best 2000 p. 8). One can thus come to the conclusion that the SMSC guidance on EYFS can best be turned into reality only with comprehensive efforts from the curriculum framers, school or nursery authorities, practitioners, parents and the local community. Part 1: A Planned, taught and evaluated activity with learners Cultural development among Early Years Foundation Stage children can best be brought about through carefully panned, taught and evaluated learning activity. An effective teacher can very easily imprint ever lasting impressions of cultural development and cultural diversity among the early stage students. Cultural development occurs only when the learners are able to celebrate their own unique cultures, maintaining respect for the cultural diversity of their peers. Children should be taught that all cultures are equally good and that there are no superior or inferior cultures. Cultural bias and prejudices that the children have intuitively learned from the families and the communities to which they belong are to be eliminated and instead a respect and value for all cultures are to be instilled in their young minds at the early foundation stage. It is identified that “cultural development is about pupils’ understanding their own culture and other cultures in their town, region and in the country as a whole. It is about understanding cultures represented in Europe and elsewhere in the world” and in order to develop cultural development among students schools should ‘value cultural diversity and prevent racism’ (Promoting and evaluating pupils’ spiritual, moral, social and cultural development 2004 p. 23). This paper evaluates the teaching session I had in a nursery class, among a group of ethnically diverse children who were three-half to four half years of age. The primary aim of the teaching lesson was to teach the students of the Chinese New Year and to enable them to create a simple collage of Chinese lion. The teaching lesson also had the higher goal of instilling in the minds of the learners a simple understanding of the Chinese culture and how Chinese children celebrate their new year just as Christmas is celebrated in the Western countries. The rational for selecting the particular content for the activity was that the children were already familiar with the concept of festivals from previous activities around the theme of festivals. Besides, creating simple collage of the Chinese lion also was an interesting activity for the children as they had previous experiences of drawing/painting/cutting & sticking facial features- eyes, nose, mouth, ears etc. To “work creatively on a large or small scale” and to “create constructions, collages, paintings and drawings” (EYES p 112) is a pleasurable activity for the children and this would keep them motivated to indulge enthusiastically in the activities. Similarly students are very eager to share their ideas on festivals and celebrations like the New Year. The activity also had ample scope for SMSC as talking about RE/festivals can provide creative stimulating and relevant learning experiences for the children as well as laying a foundation for future work on RE/festivals in school. In the same way, creative arts can help children explore feelings, thoughts, ideas and concepts related to RE/SMSC and PSHE. I was also fortunate enough to have quite a few Chinese children in my group who contributed a great deal to the discussion around Chinese New Year. The success criteria for the teaching lesson could be evaluated by how far the learners were able to make the collage of a Chinese lion. The resources or learning aids for the activity included pictures and book for the visual learners, a ready made Chinese lion to touch and feel for the Kinesthetic learners, small paper plates, ribbons, coloured papers, tissue paper and felt material cut into different shapes, glue, and the photograph of a little girl with Chinese lion mask from internet. The learning activities for the session were comprised of a carpet session (guided groups) for 2-3 minutes, 10-15 minutes of pupil activities, and two minutes of plenary. In the carpet session, I tried to introduce the concept of New Year to the students. Students were told that by January they are in the New Year and the students were asked to repeat 2009 loudly. Students are also told that the Chinese children also celebrate the Chinese New Year just as Christmas or New Year is celebrated in their homes or locality and responses were elicited from the students regarding how they celebrate the New Year or other festivals. Afterwards the paragraph from the book concerning festivals was read out. Then the picture of the girl with the Chinese lion mask was shown to the students and students were motivated to prepare same sort of collage of the Chinese lion. The key question at this stage was “shall we make Chinese lions like this girl made?” Then the ready made Chinese lion was shown to the students and they were asked whether they could make a Chinese lion too with two big eyes, eyebrow, mouth, nose, moustache and a mane as they had seen. Later, the students started making the collage of the Chinese lion and they were encourages to finish it as fast as possible so that they could add more features to their lions’ manes with more paper materials. While the students were making the Chinese lion collage they were encouraged to name what colours they had used, and how far they had finished etc. The activity ended with the plenary session. Evaluation Even though the teaching lesson was so carefully prepared, the learning objectives could not be achieved completely. As observed, this was a difficult task to do with the age group I was teaching. Even though children understood the concept of a New Year, they could not say that it was 2009. Similarly, it was not easy to asses whether the children understood anything about China or Chinese New Year. Some of the Chinese children were able to share with the other children their experience- where they went, what they did, what presents they got, what they ate etc. This was sure to have offered the other children some kind of insights into the Chinese new year celebration. The teaching I believe could have also provided a solid foundation on the subject of festivals in general. But as mentioned in my observation, I did not cover this well. The practical part was demanding because most children required one-to-one attention as their cutting/sticking manipulative skills are not remarkable enough. As a result, the involvement from the part of the adults was much more than what I expected. Even though the lesson plan was designed to provide a much more independent task the children could get on with once they understood the instructions, the activities were a bit beyond the comprehension level of students. Regarding the Classroom/behaviour management, some children seemed to be impatient as the task lasted longer than ten minutes and some children began to lose interest. However I had to keep them at the table and engaged so that the plenary could take place with all the children together. However, I was really happy to find many others interested in the activity. For them, the activity was fun; they enjoyed the discussion about lions and other wild animals. There were many others who wanted to check the lions they made with that of the internet print out of a girl wearing a lion mask to make sure their own Chinese lion was looking the same. They all learnt that lions have a mane. Thus, can be concluded that the activity was a success up to certain extend and with more preparation the same activity can be performed more effectively in a 5-6 years age group of students. A slide show or a simple video clip that includes the various aspects of the Chinese New Year and the Chinese lion could be more effective strategies to be employed to introduce these concepts. References Ashton, Elizabeth 2000. Religious Education in the Early Years, illustrated Edition, Routledge. Best, Ron 2000, Education for Spiritual, Moral, Social and Cultural Development, Illustrated Edition, Continuum International Publishing Group. Curriculum Guidance for the Foundation Stage, 2000. Qualifications and Curriculum Authority. Department for Education and Employment: London. Available from: [21 February 2009]. Introducing the EYFS to parents and carers, 1996-2008. Bupa. Available from: [21 February 2009]. Promoting and evaluating pupils’ spiritual, moral, social and cultural development. March 2004. Ofsted. Available from: < http://74.125.113.132/search?q=cache:o7uKkzx9fyQJ:www.ofsted.gov.uk/content/download/1153/8817/file/Promoting%2520and%2520evaluating%2520pupils%E2%80%99%2520spiritual,%2520moral,%2520social%2520and%2520cultural%2520development%2520(P>[21 February 2009]. The EYFS principles: a breakdown. Teaching expertise. Optimus Professional Publishing Limited. Available from: < http://www.teachingexpertise.com/articles/eyfs-principles-breakdown-4117> [21 February 2009]. Read More