Niles – curriculum

And so one of the first lessons that I often teach students about when we talk about early childhood education with tribal community is that all of us have to do a reflection of who we are and what we bring, and be willing to listen. Ultimately those qualities should be considered, in my opinion, ‘best practice’. And it’s not the idea of a certain curriculum fitting each community. The fact of the matter is if I were to go to the Hopi tribe and say ‘let’s develop a curriculum for Hopi kids, I couldn’t use that curriculum for Navajo children, nor should I. So the heterogeneity of the communities also makes things a lot more complex than a lot of times people are interested in working through because we want an easy answer. But when it comes to these types of communities, I often find that the best place to start in communities is be really talking about what it means to be a community member and how that would relate to early childhood programs.