For several years we’ve relied on an article from The Anti-Bias Curriculum to inform our holiday classroom practices. In some respects we’ve made excellent progress, and there’s always room for improvement. Again our staff has revisited our holiday practices and we’ve come up with some core values we’re considering as we plan for the upcoming holiday season:
Core Values for Awakening Seed Holiday Practices
• respect all families’ holiday traditions and ways of celebrating
• practice inclusivity by ensuring every family has the invitation to share their traditions
• teacher-provided classroom experiences will avoid secular traditions associated with holidays (e.g. Easter bunny/egg hunts, that are derived from underlying religious rituals), unless they are presented as a family’s tradition
• emphasize learning about each other’s family holidays rather than celebrating them
• create unique classroom or school celebrations
Our plan is to distribute a survey to parents in the next few days to gather information about specific family traditions and celebrations during this time of year. Individual teachers will invite parents to come in to share their family traditions/celebrations with the class. This would be an excellent opportunity for grandparents to come share family traditions with the class.
We realize that some parents’ work schedules might not allow for a classroom visit during the work day. If this is the case, you are welcome to send in a book or materials with an explanation about the tradition and the teacher will read/present it on behalf of the child.
Please note that it’s not our intention to eliminate all things Christmas from the classroom. What we want to do is give all traditions equal representation, with the teacher facilitating the learning about them, rather than presenting material and activities representing the dominant culture and traditions. In the event that some celebrations aren’t represented by families in a class, a teacher may decide to introduce them for education purposes.
For further information here’s the article mentioned above.