WK8: What I Have Learned

One hope I have when working with children and families from diverse backgrounds is that they can feel they are understood and welcomed. It is typically easy to look nice and exchange friendly conversations. However, the roles of early childhood educators are deeper than being nice around the children and their families. I hope to understand what their beliefs are, what differences and discomfort they have experienced when dealing the dominant groups, and what anxiety they have so that I can help the children to develop positive identities and to be fully nurtured.

One goal I would like to set for the early childhood field is to increase the number of staff and teachers who are educated on anti-bias education. Anti-bias education is very important because it affects healthy identity development. I believe this is more important in the long run than teaching letters or math. However, I feel that currently more and more time and interest are devoted to more academic topics. That is why I set this goal.  

                    

To my colleagues,

Thank you very much for sharing your insights. I hope we all can become true anti-bias educator and make changes in the early childhood field. Please let me know if I can help you with something even after we finish our course.

 

Aya

Start Seeing Diversity Blog: Creating Art

What I wanted to show in the illustration is that children build their identities from what other people think about them or their groups, which can be biases, something that causes children to feel discomfort or trauma (Spay of the colors indicating that). I also wanted to show that those messages or experiences stay in children as they grow up. I did not add physical features for the children because the differences among children are limitless and these differences are equally important. The colors are both in dark and bright colors because children get positive and negative messages and the mix of the colors can be taken as beautiful or dirty depending on people viewing it because I believe that identities are the same since some people may think one person’s features are cool and others may not agree. I chose to not put faces on the children as they are growing up in the illustration because some children view their identities as positive and others do not. I also wanted to show identities are subjective and dynamic in some ways.

 

Start Seeing Diversity Blog: "We Don't Say Those Words in Class!"

While out shopping at the mall with friends, my six-year-old daughter and her friend saw two adults with restricted growth walking, they started to giggle and said, “Look at those people!” to us moms while pointing at them. I told my daughter not to point at them, while my friend said the same to her son, and explained, in serious tone, that there are people who look differently and it is not something we should think of as funny.  

 

Our children instantly stopped giggling and did not pay attention to them when we came across them again later on as we shopped. So from our reactions, our children learned that we should not regard+ physical differences as funny things.  At that same time though, they might have taken our response as a message that we should not have interests or curiosities in people who look differently than ourselves.

 

An anti-bias educator might have used this as teachable moment. For example, he or she could have used the children’s curiosity to cultivate understanding. An anti-bias educator might have asked the children why they think little people were funny, explain why they are short and try to give a chance for the children to talk to those adults with restricted growth and ask if they are different inside.