Chapter 7: Culture as Framework Versus Ingredient in Early Childhood Education: A Native Hawaiian Perspective

The concept of developmentally appropriate practice has long served as the touchstone for discussions of early childhood education, bringing with it universalistic assumptions about the proper teaching of young children and the normative course of learning, regardless of children’s cultural and linguistic backgrounds. Perhaps as a result, research in early childhood education based on assumptions of difference, rather than deficit, is much less common than in elementary and secondary education, as recent reviews attest (Castagno & Brayboy, 2008; Osborne, 1996). Yet, the urgency of promoting research in early childhood education to address issues of diversity in culture and language has never been greater. The larger forces at work include globalization, which tends to promote educational practices that deny the place of local cultures and languages (Spring, 2008), as well as the U.S. push for universal preschool, which tends to reduce the options available to families of diverse backgrounds (Sarsona, Goo, Kawakami, & Au, 2008). The exception occurs in cases, such as that of Hawai‘i, where state legislation provides support for a variety of early childhood efforts, including home visits, family care, parent-participation preschools, and center-based preschools.

We argue in this chapter for the importance of building early childhood education programs for indigenous students on the foundation of indigenous perspectives, using the Native Hawaiian perspective as our example. We believe that traditional Hawaiian educational values and methods should be adopted for the education of Native Hawaiian students, including the very youngest. In our view, it is not enough to infuse culture into education; culturally based values and methods need to drive how education is delivered. A proper honoring of the family, community, land, and indigenous language have the potential to revitalize education for young Native Hawaiian children, and in the process offer program innovations beneficial to teachers and students of many ethnic groups in Hawai‘i and around the globe.

We begin by defining what we mean by an indigenous perspective, with a specific application to Native Hawaiians. We provide conceptual overviews of culture as framework versus culture as ingredient, and of culturally responsive instruction. We introduce Keiki Steps, a parent-participation preschool (also referred to as a family–child interaction learning program) for Native Hawaiian children, as an example of a program that uses Hawaiian culture as its framework. To make clear how Keiki Steps has been shaped by Hawaiian culture, we discuss two key values that should inform early childhood programs designed for Native Hawaiian children: ‘ohana (family) and kaiāulu (community).