Focus: Promoting Tolerance and Respect for Diversity in Early Childhood

Issues: Children & Youth; Education; Tolerance

Region: North America

As part of the initiative, "Promoting Tolerance and Respect for Diversity in Early Childhood: Toward A Research and Practice Agenda," the National Center for Children in Poverty (NCCP) attempted to map the nature of U.S. approaches to diversity, tolerance, and respect for diversity (DTRD) education in programs directed to children from birth to ten years of age, in order to identify: current DTRD curricula used in early childhood education and other initiatives; common components across initiatives; evaluation designs and methodologies; and barriers and opportunities related to implementation, as well as potential levers for taking DTRD education to scale. Approximately 40 organizations implementing DTRD programs with children from birth to 10 years of age, and/or their parents, teachers or caregivers were identified through internet searches, recommendations, or the literature. The foregoing pages present a summary of the main points discussed with representatives from ten organizations, followed by descriptive profiles of all the organizations identified.

Established solely for the purpose of promoting respect for diversity and reducing or eliminating prejudice, most organizations followed a broad approach to prejudice, focusing on a wide variety of disparities and stereotypes, and prompting program participants to draw parallels and examine similarities among different kinds of prejudice and the impact of government policies and social practices on different groups.

External Links:
- National Center for Children in Poverty

Downloads:
- Promoting Tolerance and Respect for Diversity in Early Childhood (Adobe .pdf)
- Promoting Social Inclusion and Respect for Diversity in Early Childhood (Adobe .pdf)
- A View from the Field (Adobe .pdf)
- Toward a Research and Practice Agenda (Adobe .pdf)
- Annotated Bibliography (Adobe .pdf)