ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the concept of culture and its necessity in building and developing a culturally responsive pedagogy in Early Childhood Education and Care. Socio-cultural perspectives propose that educators need to understand ‘the development of children in the context of their own communities’. At the core of the socio-cultural perspective is L. S. Vygotsky, who believed that cultural forms of behaviour arise during infancy, in particular in the use of tools and the development of human speech: ‘This alone places infancy at the centre of the prehistory of cultural development’. Educational ideologies play an important role in shaping the curriculum, and is culture more evidently displayed than in a country’s curriculum. A curriculum embodies distinct beliefs about the type of knowledge that should be taught, the inherent nature of children, what learning consists of, how educators should teach children, and how children should be assessed.
