ImmigrantChildren.ca Archive

Category: Early Learning and Child Care

Issues related to immigrant children and parents participation in and access to early learning and child care programs and to how well EL & CC programs meet the needs of diverse groups of families in Canada.

  • The Arrival – a picture book about immigration

    In The Arrival, author/illustrator Shaun Tan “tells” the story (without words) of an immigrant in a new land. Tan’s description:

    “The Arrival is a migrant story told as a series of wordless images that might seem to come from a long forgotten time. A man leaves his wife and child in an impoverished town, seeking better prospects in an unknown country on the other side of a vast ocean. He eventually finds himself in a bewildering city of foreign customs, peculiar animals, curious floating objects and indecipherable languages. With nothing more than a suitcase and a handful of currency, the immigrant must find a place to live, food to eat and some kind of gainful employment. He is helped along the way by sympathetic strangers, each carrying their own unspoken history: stories of struggle and survival in a world of incomprehensible violence, upheaval and hope”.

    It is both a book for children and a book for adults. It is beautiful, compelling and a must-see. Tan has won several children’s literature awards for this work. See Shaun Tan’s website for more on The Arrival, including some of the illustrations.

  • Promoting social inclusion and respect for diversity in the early years

    The Bernard Van Leer Foundation has published a collection of articles that address diversity in early childhood education. Included in the collection is an article by Martha Friendly entitled “How ECEC programmes contribute to social inclusion in diverse communities“. Friendly outlines four concepts that make the case on how ECEC contributes to inclusion.
    The first concept is “development of talents, skills and capabilities in the early years affects both a child’s well-being and its future impact on the social, educational, financial and personal domains as the child enters adulthood. A second concept is that the family its environment – shaped by culture, ethnicity and race, class and income – have a significant impact on the developing child in early and throughout later childhood. Third, from a non-stigmatizing perspective social inclusion is not only about reducing risk but is also about ensuring the opportunities are not missed. A fourth concept takes a child’s right perspective in proposing that children are not merely adults-in-training but must be valued as children, not for simply who they what they may become later on”.