Navigating Cultural Differences

Abstract

Abstract Although the disconnect between young newcomer children’s experiences at home and in early childhood settings is commonly attributed to different cultural values and practices, there is little research on how young children perceive, experience, and navigate it. This chapter draws on Vygotsky’s concept of perezhivanie to interpret a case study of a young child’s dialectical becoming in the process of creating herself as a unique subject interacting within a social and cultural environment of both home and school, as a source of her development. Through creative and imaginative activities of play and art-making, the child was engaged in creating and recreating social situations to navigate and negotiate complexities and differences between these social and cultural institutions, experiences, and influences. The chapter offers a deeper pedagogical understanding of the dynamic relationship between the social and the individual aspects of the young newcomer child’s complex subjective configurations of different social instances and systems of relationships within more complex systems of society.