Equity Through Dialogue: American Samoan Community-Based Perspectives on Head Start

• In Event: 42.068 - Examining Head Start: The Role of Curriculum, Nutrition, Assessment, and Research Engagements

Abstract

Objectives:
This paper traces how universalized Head Start curriculum is given meaning and negotiated in preschools in American Samoa, a territory of the United States. With the most recent reauthorization of the federally funded Head Start program in 2007, research based curriculums have been mandated in all Head Start Early Childhood programs. In American Samoa, this has taken the form of the implementation of Creative Curriculum. Curricular programs such as these, western in nature, often reflect research conducted in areas, and with populations vastly different than those in Island communities. This paper attempts to discuss the discord between western approaches, central to many early childhood programs and those of indigenous early childhood communities in the Pacific.

Framework:
This research employs a post-colonial perspective (Bhahba, 2012; Said, 1979) to examine how indigenous approaches to child raising and education of young children are often omitted from early childhood curriculum. Following Gayatari Spivak (1988), it investigates whose voices are central and whose are omitted in the education of young children in American Samoa. It questions if child centered approaches, central to western early childhood programs are actually child centered when they come into conflict with local cultural norms.

Methods:
Data was gathered over a fifteen month period, using standard ethnographic methods. Methods included participant observation, document analysis and interviews conducted with 12 local preschool teachers in Tutuila and Manua islands. Field notes were gathered in two preschool classrooms on Tutuila, the most populous island of American Samoa. All interviews were recorded and later transcribed.

Data:
Data included field notes, interview transcripts, Head Start policy documents and Creative Curriculum documents. Data was coded iteratively and themes were later developed. We analyzed data using a constant comparative method (Glaser & Strauss, 1967).

Results:
Interviews and field notes indicate that child centered approaches, central to creative curriculum and Head Start Standards sharply contrast with American Samoan culturally based, community approaches to child care and education. American Samoa is an extremely collective and hierarchical society. In American Samoa, children are expected to learn from elders in a collective manner, similar to an apprenticeship model (Rogoff, 2003). Teacher interviews indicated Creative Curriculum contrasted sharply with local cultural expectations. Yet far from powerless, local teachers, often changed, omitted and added local cultural aspects to the mandated curriculum in order to make lessons more culturally appropriate for the context of Samoa.

Scholarly Significance:
There is an increase of universalized and increasingly standardized early childhood curriculum and accompanying assessments in Head Start classrooms. Yet community programs such as Head Start can better meet the cultural needs of local communities and alleviate cultural discord when we better listen to local teachers. More broadly, this research shows empirical possibilities for local early childhood to teachers to reimagine, reconfigure and ultimately alter curriculum to better meet the needs of local communities.

Authors

• Allison Sterling Henward, Penn State University

• Mene Tauaa, University of Hawaii - Manoa

• Ronald Turituri