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Parents
Keywords: Indian-American parents, multicultural issues, secular, global studies, lessons about India, cultural awareness, cultural literacy, culture, heritage, global education, cultural parenting
This are some of the things you will find on this website:
-
Homework
Help - social studies, history, geography, arts
and
crafts, english language arts - Go to Lessons - links to lessons are on our home page
- Teach your child about India - share your heritage with your child - many suggestions to be found in these pages
- Connect with your child as you explore your shared roots
- Learning activities and games for your children
- Links to movies, sound recordings and book lists
- Connect with other parents through our website
-
Parenting
advice from author Meenal Pandya - "Cultural
Parenting"
Ruchi and her two children have used lessons from this website since 2007
-
Occassional
articles on parenting issues such as
Learning
Difficulties
Our Story
About Being
Multicultural
Start Your Own
Study Group - Nine Tips
Cultural Parenting - by Meenal Pandya. Parenting advice in
a series of short essays.
Our Story
The Teach India Project a 501(c)3 non-profit
registered in the USA.
The Teach India Project is an
outgrowth of a unique collaboration between parents and
educators.
The parent story: In 2004
four mothers with children in the same school in the United States
found that they all wanted to teach their children about India.
Two of the moms grew up in the USA while the other two had relocated
here as adults. Each was originally from a different part of
India. All had enrolled their children in activities related
to India but felt that something was lacking. Their children
were not making the connections to India they wanted.
Something more was needed. They noticed that their
children lived in two completely parallel cultural worlds and feared
for the stress that was in store for them.
The moms decided to
fill the gap themselves and started a study group about India with
their children. They called this group Indianroots. Many
of the things described here draw on the experiences of the parents
and children of Indianroots.
The teacher story:
At this school teachers stayed connected with students who would
come back to visit and tell them about how difficult it had been to
grow up in an environment defined by stereotypes and bias and peer
pressure to conform to a cultural norm. The teachers pushed
their administration to develop programs on global education and
multicultural literacy. They engaged with parents to create
teaching kits about India and the collaboration began.
The
Teach India Project was incorporated in 2007.
About being multicultural
Learnings from the Indianroots
experience:
We are a community of
co-learners. All of us in the group, children and
adults, share our collective knowledge and experience
and learn from each other
We believe that religion
and ritual are personal to each family and are best
taught at home.
Our purpose is to develop
cultural literacy so that we share with our children a
broad range of specific knowledge (about India) that
makes good communication possible. We hope to go
beyond learning that one might acquire from a textbook
to real life that is interwoven with art, expression,
history and experience. Cultural literacy is not
an educational aim but a guarantee that parents,
children and grandparents will understand and relate
better to each other.
Our further purpose is to
ensure that our children are multiculturally literate so
that they value diversity, understand the perspectives
of other cultural groups, are sensitive to issues of
bias, racism, prejudice and stereotyping and are willing
to actively engage with other cultures.
At the
end of the day we hope that our children have the
knowledge, skills and attitudes needed to function
effectively within their own cultural communities,
within the cultures of whichever country they live in,
and in the global community. Strong positive
cultural identification within their own ethnic,
cultural and language groups is the foundation that we
are building for this.