The model presented here is intended to help schools guide the growth of a learner's understanding of cultural diversity; it offers a perspective that allows educators to link the role of the school to the early formative experiences of family and local community, and it utilizes a curriculum responsive to the concerns of that community. The school becomes the site for the learner to come into contact with the similarities and differences within one's own family and community and creates a foundation through these contacts to explore an ever widening circle of relationships. These relationships and the influences of early experiences help to form the learner's self-image and image of the world. The school enlarges these influences, and finally, the learner, broadened by the school experience, returns to influence the community, state, and country. Consequently, the movement in the model begins with the learner and the family, moves outward as the learner enlarges his/her conceptions of society and community, and then moves inward, back to the local level. This outward-inward movement occurs many times as the learner matures and as the learner's experiential base expands and influences the value structure based in the family and immediate community. (Contains 25 references.) (Author/LL)