04/18/2006

Creating a Community of Caring

In her article, "Creating Safe Places for Conflict Resolution to Happen," in the Exchange book, Behavior, Carolyn Edwards observes...

"A community can be seen as a setting in which people develop a set of connected relationships and shared values. With increased use of full-day child care for young children, it becomes more and more important to transform classrooms into core communities for children and their families. When children form friendships and an attachment to their peer group and an identification with adults, they become motivated to want to learn the rules of group living and try to live by them. Without such motivation and identification, children remain outside the value system: they can mouth the rules but they do not care about them. Thus, the classroom community does not replace the child's family in its role as socializer, but rather provides critically needed support in that mission.

"A community requires a time, a place, and a shared life. It is difficult for early childhood teachers to establish these in the face of low budgets, dark and unaesthetic physical surroundings, and high staff turnover. The teacher's best hope is to firmly situate the core community of her classroom in a nest of ever-widening, supportive circles that can offer two things. The first is resources: labor, time, and money to improve the physical environment; salary upgrading to reduce turnover and enhance continuity and stability; emotional and professional support.

"The second is wider meanings. The classroom community is strongest when the environment and curriculum are literally drenched with images and experiences connected to outside communities — in particular, the school itself, families past and present, and the neighborhood, town, and region. This is rarely the case in American preschools and child care centers, which often have an institutional feel or are so intentionally universalistic in the statement they make that they could be anywhere. A community is by nature a particular place, built up over the years and resonant of a shared life extending over time and connected to the visible world and people."

— Contributed by Exchange, The Early Childhood Leaders' Magazine Since 1978

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