Dear colleagues
This month, we celebrate Cultural Diversity Week, running from Monday 17 to Sunday 23 March 2025. It’s a great time to acknowledge our state’s diverse and vibrant multicultural communities.
The Victorian Early Years Learning and Development Framework outlines the fundamental role of early childhood education in fostering and promoting cultural awareness in children. We know that children achieve better outcomes when their diverse strengths, abilities, interests and cultural practices are understood and supported.
This year’s theme – ‘Embrace the journey, shape our future’ – has a special resonance for early childhood education. In our sector, we have a unique role in creating learning environments built around inclusion and respect, in which children actively learn about and appreciate differences from an early age.
During the week, you might consider ways of showcasing cultural diversity at your service such as setting up displays celebrating different cultures and traditions, and their contributions to your community. Or you can provide opportunities for community members to actively participate through activities like cooking demonstrations, craft-making sessions and storytelling circles.
It’s also a great chance to share some of our many resources designed to help services support families from culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) backgrounds, which are outlined below. Please take the time to explore these and send them on to your colleagues.
In this edition, we share 2 new resources, developed in partnership with fka Children’s Services, to support services to engage with multilingual families.
The Supporting CALD families to engage in kindergarten webpage also has a wealth of information to support services to communicate with CALD families about the benefits of kindergarten.
All kindergarten services are eligible to access free on-site, telephone and video interpreters to strengthen engagement with parents and carers who speak a language other than English or use Auslan.
The Information about kindergarten in your language webpage also includes resources translated into 30 languages to support families to build their understanding of kindergarten.
Embracing diversity and inclusion is of course vital to children’s learning and development, but it’s also important for our workforce, too.
The Early Childhood Tertiary Partnerships program offers a range of tertiary courses with additional support for people from CALD backgrounds. Support includes:
- in-language supports to enrol and complete your studies
- academic and workplace mentors who are culturally responsive.
Finally, this month we also celebrate International Women’s Day on Saturday 8 March 2025. It’s an opportunity for us all to celebrate the social, economic, cultural and political achievements of women, which are woven through both the history and contemporary experience of our sector, and which our sector helps support in our wider community. For information on how you can mark the day, visit the International Women’s Day website.
I invite you all to read and share this month’s edition with your colleagues. We would also love to hear stories about how your service will celebrate Cultural Diversity Week, so please feel free to share them with us.
Wishing you all the best for the month ahead.
Bronwen FitzGerald
Deputy Secretary
Early Childhood Education
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