Common Course Outline

Catalog Description

Course Description

Children are born into and experience belonging and connectedness in their families, culture, and community. Early childhood educators recognize that families are the child’s first and most important teacher, that children come from many different backgrounds, and that children thrive when culturally responsive practices provide continuity of care and learning. This course examines family-centered care, cross-cultural communication, culturally responsive practices, and family engagement to promote children’s development and academic success.

Date Last Revised (Month, year)

December, 2024

Outline of Major Content Areas

1. Role of family in children's development and learning
2. Promoting cultural awareness and dialogue with families and in the classroom
3. Recognize individual biases and practice inclusivity modeling respect, value, and awareness
4. Communicating across cultures
5. Teacher-Family partnerships in early childhood education
6. Culturally Responsive Teaching Practices
7. Global awareness, diversity, identity, and cultural studies in early education
8. Multiple theories of race and ethnicity

Learning Outcomes (General)

The student will be able to:

1. Identify that students bring assets for learning based on their individual experiences, abilities, talents, prior learning, and peer and social group interactions, as well as language, culture, family, and community values, and approaches their work and students with this asset-based mindset, affirming the validity of students' backgrounds and identities.
2. Correlate multiple theories of identity formation and knows how to help students develop positive social identities based on their membership in multiple groups in society.
3. Demonstrate and identify how alignment with a student's cultural background is necessary to make meaningful connections that enable the construction of knowledge and acquisition of skills.
4. Relate how culture influences cognitive processes and how these processes can be stimulated in a cultural frame.
5. Identify the diverse impacts of individual and systemic trauma, such as experiencing homelessness, foster care, incarceration, migration, medical fragility, racism, and micro and macro aggressions, on learning and development and knows how to support students using culturally responsive strategies and resources to address these impacts.
6. Identify how prejudice, discrimination, and how racism operates at the interpersonal, intergroup, and institutional levels.
7. Identify and explore their own intersecting social identities and how they impact daily experience as an educator.
8. Assess how their biases, perceptions, and academic training may affect their teaching practice and perpetuate oppressive systems and utilizes tools to mitigate their own behavior to disrupt oppressive systems.
9. Develop and design the importance of engaging in culturally affirming, reciprocal communication with families about student development, learning, and performance.
10. Recognize the responsibility to question normative school knowledge, conventional teaching and other professional practices, and beliefs and assumptions about diverse students, their families, and communities that adversely impact learning.
11. Identify multiple theories of race and ethnicity, including but not limited to racial formation, processes of racialization, and intersectionality.
12. Establish the definitions of and difference between prejudice, discrimination, bias, and racism.
13. Articulate how ethnocentrism, eurocentrism, deficit-based teaching, and white supremacy undermine pedagogical equity.
14. Associate that knowledge creation, ways of knowing, and teaching are social and cultural practices shaped by race and ethnicity, often resulting in racially disparate advantages and disadvantages.
15. Identify the histories and social struggles of historically defined racialized groups, including but not limited to Indigenous people, Black Americans, Latinx Americans, and Asian Americans.
16. Correlate the cultural content, world view, concepts, and perspectives of Minnesota-based American Indian Tribal Nations and communities, including Indigenous histories and languages.
17. Identify the impact of the intersection of race and ethnicity with other forms of difference, including class, gender, sexuality, religion, national origin, immigration status, language, ability, and age.

Learning Outcomes (MnTC)

NA

Methods for Evaluation of Student Learning

Methods may include but are not limited to:

• Discussion Participation
• Written assignments
• Exams
• Project

RCTC Core Outcome(s)

This course contributes to meeting the following RCTC Core Outcome(s):

Global Awareness and Diversity

Students will demonstrate an understanding of and respect for human diversity through their words and actions.

Special Information (if any)

None