Janmohamed – recommendations

There are three things that are coming up, one is that in the same way that we’re, are comfortable talking about the development of language or social-/emotional development, we need to embed, in course content, gender development and sexuality, and I think that that comes from the perspective of children’s development, as a way for educators to understand that it’s very much a part of our being.

The second thing that I think that’s important is that, in the material that we actually use in class, with the students, we need to be able to embed content that relates to gender identity, sexual identity, so that people are comfortable, and start to understand that families come in all sorts of shapes and sizes, and they come just slightly more different than we thought that they would be.

And then the third thing, I think in practice, where, there is still a fair amount of ‘heteronormative’ practice in early childhood programs, things like, saying to a little girl, “You look so pretty today, oh look, your boyfriend is here,” and that’s completely unnecessary with, you know, three and four year old children, but it’s actually very much the case, or we don’t know how to encourage girl children to engage in the block area, we don’t know how to encourage boy children to move to the drama center, and then sometimes when we do come across those boy children who like to be in the drama center, and want to be a princess all the time, we’re unsure about how to react, if to react at all, and I think that in the practice situations that those are possibilities of case studies that we can talk about, that would help inform the Early Childhood Practitioner.