Biculturism

As our nations becomes increasingly more diverse, educators and others working with children need to deal better with differing cultures and languages. Some develop programs that focus on the specific needs of minority students while others include all cultures, ethnicities,, languages and even sexual orientation.
Early childhood is a critical time for children to develop their group identities, beliefs and interpersonal skills. To respond effectively to language and cultural diversity, we need to consider what becoming bi-cultural means to young minority children.

These children must learn to function in two worlds effectively. They live in their home culture and need to learn the dominate culture so they can become educated and well employed. In Australia, the Aboriginals ( indigenous Australians) have to learn two sets of communication styles and symbols., cognitive orientations, values and rituals to be able to negotiate their two different lives.
W.E. du Bois first documented the duality of culture and race writing about “double consciousness: in 1903. Others called it double vision(Wright,1953), multidimensional(Cross, 1978), bicultural ( Banks, 1988; de Anda, 1984; Ramirez and Castanda, 1974; Rashid, 1981) and two-way(Harris, 1990).
The Aboriginal mothers sent their children at very young ages to early childhood centers to “learn the ways of the whitefella.” They believe it is so important to give their children this development ability, that they overlook that the staff may trivialize and stereo type the children’s culture. Rashid(1981) stated that all children should be bicultural as did Banks(1993) seeing the ideal as children having a balance of ethnics, national and global identification and loss of ethnocentrism.

Antonia Darder(1991) suggests that becoming bicultural is a process of mediation. She stresses the unequal