Program Profile: Children’s Village Child Care Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

At Children’s Village Child Care Center in Philadelphia’s Chinatown, open communication transcends the challenges posed by language and cultural differences.

Program Overview
As a program serving an urban population, Children’s Village embraces families of all economic levels, ethnic and cultural backgrounds, and constellations. “The core belief of Children’s Village’s philosophy on engaging diverse families,” according to Director Mary Graham, “is that there is no substitute for open conversation—listening closely and seeking mutual understanding with transparent interest and curiosity. Candid one-to-one communication between staff and family members is irreplaceable.”

Family Engagement Program Practices

Family Participation in Decision Making
All parents have the opportunity to participate in decision making, in part because of Children’s Village’s compliance with the national Head Start Program Performance Standards. Many parents serve on committees, engage in interactive workshops on child development and education, and 98 percent participate in parent-teacher conferences.

Two-Way Communication and a Comprehensive Program-Level System
Given Children’s Village’s high population of non-English-speaking children, staff members use a variety of tools to foster two-way communication with families. Head Start funding allowed Children’s Village to develop a family services team to improve home-school communication through professional interpretation and translation and through other family-centered services. The resulting translation and interpretation protocol is part of Children’s Village’s comprehensive program-level system, which institutionalizes policies and procedures related to family engagement. The protocol makes clear that each family has the right to be entirely understood and to receive accurate information from administrative and teaching staff.

What do these policies look like in practice?

• Bilingual English- and Chinese-speaking staff work in the reception area.
• The Children’s Village website includes a parent section in English and Chinese.
• On a regular basis, bilingual family partnership coordinators provide on-the-spot interpretation between adult family members and non-Chinese-speaking teachers.  This occurs in the classrooms, during drop-off and pickup times.
• Teaching teams use digital cameras to document learning activities in the classroom and in the community. Photo captions are written in Chinese and English and highlight what was said or what children learned.

Families who speak languages other than Chinese feel welcome too.

• A parent says, “We speak Spanish and English at home. Milly [the teacher] is a native Spanish speaker, so she speaks Spanish and English with our daughter, which has helped her vocabulary.”
• Another family notes, “Our lead teacher is Hispanic, and so are we. It is important for our daughter to hear Spanish from others out of home.”

Reciprocal Relationships
Children’s Village teachers are adept at sharing and exchanging knowledge with families. One parent says, “Teachers are very careful to record each child’s strengths, interests, and shortcomings. At each parent-teacher conference, teachers and parents exchange what the child did at school or at home. We work together…Children’s Village has a great impact for my family” [translated from Chinese].

Head Start families receive two required home visits per year by the teacher, but home visits are also offered to all families in the program. This shows that families feel connected to teachers. Home visit guidelines include conversation prompts that inspire a level of exchange to raise staff awareness of family history, values, and strengths. Prompts may include questions about the immigration experience—perhaps acknowledging that a child may have spent significant time in China, away from her parents, while they established themselves in the United States. Questions might include

• How has your child adjusted to her family life here?
• What has it been like for you?
• What are some things you do together to build your relationship?
• How do you help her get closer to her siblings?
• Do you still have family in your home country? How do you stay in touch?

Learning Activities at Home and in the Community
Staff strive to help support families’ efforts to create a learning environment outside of the program. In 1999, Children’s Village started an ongoing ESL class for parents and relatives of children enrolled in the program. The ESL classes have evolved and are now an integral and popular component of Children’s Village’s services for non-English-speaking families. The teacher routinely modifies her curriculum to accommodate students’ needs. For example,

• In the past, students have wanted help learning to talk to teachers. The ESL teacher developed a parent-requested list of vocabulary words (for example, behavior, skills, language, development, progress, learning, names of classes, and staff titles) as well as a set of questions for parents to use in discussing their child with teachers (such as “How is he doing today?” “Did he have a good appetite today?”).
• The ESL teacher has developed curricula related to parents’ other interests and needs—for example, shopping, emergency medical care, directions, and the playground.

While many parents are eager for their children to become fluent in English, they are strongly encouraged to use their native home language in daily conversation and when they read books aloud. An on-staff librarian holds a literacy workshop to coach parents on how to read stories with children in their home language. Children’s Village supports these literacy efforts through a lending library of nearly 3,000 titles of high-quality children’s literature in English and Chinese, with some selections in other languages.

Developed for NAEYC's Engaging Diverse Families Project through a generous grant from the Picower Foundation.
© National Association for the Education of Young Children.