MISSION & PHILOSOPHY

Mission Statement

The mission of Delaney Wright Fine Arts Preschool is to provide high quality care to families of all backgrounds in an environment that celebrates diversity and the arts.

Our Philosophy

At the heart of what we do at Delaney Wright is the belief that when children are provided a safe and nurturing environment to explore and grow that they are able to learn and develop into their own individual uniqueness and become individuals who are also capable and empathetic.  This whole-child approach allows us to help children grow and develop within each area of development, including social, emotional, intellectual, and physical growth, through the lens of the fine arts.  Our philosophy encompasses the following principles: 

Whole Child Approach

When children feel physically and emotionally safe, they are more ready to learn and feel more engaged in their school community and community abroad.  We believe in supporting the child’s development as a unique individual, while also challenging them in developmentally appropriate ways to continue to grow and develop.  Through doing this, children develop a sense of themselves as unique individuals, while also respecting the needs and feelings of others.

Anti-Bias Education

It is the job of adults to help young children construct a positive sense of self and a respectful understanding of others.  Anti-bias education at Delaney Wright involves creating a community that supports all dimensions of human differences.  We understand that at its core, anti-bias education needs to permeate everything that happens in our program – including the interactions between children, families, and staff – and shapes how we create our curriculum each day.  The specific goals of anti-bias curriculum are that:

• Each child will demonstrate self-awareness, confidence, family pride, and positive social identities,

• Each child will express comfort and joy with human diversity; accurate language for human differences; and deep, caring human connections,

• Each child will increasingly recognize unfairness, have language to describe unfairness, and understand that unfairness hurts and,

• Each child will demonstrate empowerment and the skills to act, with others or alone, against prejudice and/or discriminatory actions.

In the classroom, we foster experiences for children to recognize and value differences and likeness, to express their feelings when discomfort occurs, and to ask questions that support healthy emotional and social development.  We strongly encourage families to work with the teachers in helping incorporate different familial cultures or holidays into the curriculum.

Adults as co-facilitators of learning

The role of the adult, whether it is a teacher or parent, is to help guide the child through their role as explorers and enquirers of their own knowledge with careful and sensitive listening, observation, and reflection.  Our teachers provide stimulating classroom environments that allow the children to discover and develop, while also providing thoughtful responses to children’s dialogue and strong social collaboration, where each child is an equal participant and the teacher is not seen as the giver of knowledge, but rather as the co-collaborator of knowledge.