eBook - ePub
Each and Every Child
Using an Equity Lens When Teaching in Preschool
Susan Friedman, Alissa Mwenelupembe, Susan Friedman, Alissa Mwenelupembe
This is a test
Share book
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub
Each and Every Child
Using an Equity Lens When Teaching in Preschool
Susan Friedman, Alissa Mwenelupembe, Susan Friedman, Alissa Mwenelupembe
Book details
Book preview
Table of contents
Citations
About This Book
This robust collection of articles from Teaching Young Children offers practical guidance and tips for keeping equity at the forefront of the curriculum and classroom practices. A wide range of diverse voices from the early childhood education field provide insight on various aspects of advancing equity, from supporting family diversity to considering children's language and culture when planning learning activities. This accessible, concrete guide on hot-button, timely issues helps classroom teachers determine what exactly being equitable means in their everyday context and interactions with children, their families, and colleagues.
Frequently asked questions
How do I cancel my subscription?
Can/how do I download books?
At the moment all of our mobile-responsive ePub books are available to download via the app. Most of our PDFs are also available to download and we're working on making the final remaining ones downloadable now. Learn more here.
What is the difference between the pricing plans?
Both plans give you full access to the library and all of Perlegoâs features. The only differences are the price and subscription period: With the annual plan youâll save around 30% compared to 12 months on the monthly plan.
What is Perlego?
We are an online textbook subscription service, where you can get access to an entire online library for less than the price of a single book per month. With over 1 million books across 1000+ topics, weâve got you covered! Learn more here.
Do you support text-to-speech?
Look out for the read-aloud symbol on your next book to see if you can listen to it. The read-aloud tool reads text aloud for you, highlighting the text as it is being read. You can pause it, speed it up and slow it down. Learn more here.
Is Each and Every Child an online PDF/ePUB?
Yes, you can access Each and Every Child by Susan Friedman, Alissa Mwenelupembe, Susan Friedman, Alissa Mwenelupembe in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Education & Early Childhood Education. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.
Information
Topic
EducationSubtopic
Early Childhood EducationPART 1
Nurturing Your Own Empathy and Understanding Behavior
Recommendations from the Position Statement
Uphold the unique value and dignity of each child and family. Ensure that all children see themselves and their daily experiences, as well as the daily lives of others within and beyond their community, positively reflected in the design and implementation of pedagogy, curriculum, learning environment, interactions, and materials. Celebrate diversity by acknowledging similarities and differences and provide perspectives that recognize beauty and value across differences.
Recognize each childâs unique strengths and support the full inclusion of all childrenâgiven differences in culture, family structure, language, racial identity, gender, abilities and disabilities, religious beliefs, or economic class. Help children get to know, recognize, and support one another as valued members of the community. Take care that no one feels bullied, invisible, or unnoticed.
What would the world be like if everyone practiced empathy and made a conscious effort to understand the perspectives of others? Now think about the sort of education that is required for such a world. To learn empathy, children need to be surrounded by it and see it at the heart of every interaction they have with adults they trust as well as other children. As a teacher, you play a huge role in supporting and instilling this value by creating a warm, inclusive learning environment that respects and celebrates different experiences, cultures, and backgrounds.
Part of developing and nurturing empathy is recognizing that everyone has their own cultural lens that guides their behaviors and informs their interactions with and expectations of others. When a childâs behavior in the classroom deviates from a teacherâs expectations, the teacher might look for tools to change or manage that behavior. But sometimes childrenâs behaviors are tied to cultural norms and expectations that are simply different from your own. Looking at the whole child and considering how that child's culture and experiences shape his behavior are key to being a culturally responsive teacher who knows how to effectively support each child in your classroom. As you read the chapters in this section, think about the children you work with, especially those who you sometimes find challenging. What might you not know about each child? How might you go deeper in your relationship with each childâs family to learn more?
Read and Reflect
As you read the chapters in this section, consider and evaluate your own classroom practices using these reflection questions.
1. Everyone has biases (implicit and explicit) that contribute to their interactions, their understanding of situations, and the messages sent to children. Think of a time when your biases may have affected your perception of a childâs behavior. What was your initial perception? What did you later consider, and how did that consideration change your initial perception?
2. Take a moment to reflect on the circle time vignette in Chapter 1. Try filming part of your day as those teachers did and watch the recording with a colleague. What does the video recording reveal that you didnât notice in the heat of the moment? How can you make sure your own biases arenât leading to increased discipline for one group of children?
3. Research shows that teachers tend to be less empathetic with children who have different ethnic and cultural backgrounds from their own. Select two of the suggested practices outlined in Chapter 2 to improve upon in your own work with children. Which practices did you choose to focus on and why? What will you do differently?
4. Chapter 3 discusses how each personâs upbringing influences her work with young children. Take a moment and reflect on your childhood. What values did your family have? How might those values influence your own values today?
5. For young children, representation matters. Why do you think it is important for the children you teach to see themselves represented in their classroom? How does this connect to empathy and showing children you see and care about them? What changes could you make to the books on your shelf or the images on your walls to make them more representative? Brainstorm a list of ways you can add representations of diversity to your classroom.
Photograph: © Getty Images
CHAPTER 1
Examining Teacher Bias
Early childhood educators are committed to the principle that every child deserves to develop to her fullest potential. At the same time, the world is not yet a place where all children have equal opportunity to become all they can be. Beyond an individual teacherâs hopes, beliefs, and actions is a society that has built advantage and disadvantage into its institutions and systems. These dynamics of advantage and disadvantage are deeply rooted in history. They continue to shape the degree of access children have to education, health care, and securityâthe services necessary for childrenâs healthy development. They also generate messages and actions that directly and indirectly reinforce harmful ideas and stereotyping and that undermine childrenâs sense of worth, especially when they come from someone as significant as a teacher.
This chapter is adapted from Derman-Sparks & Edwards with Goins 2020.
Anti-bias education is an optimistic commitment to supporting all children in a highly diverse and yet still inequitable world. It is founded on the understanding that as well as having individual temperaments and personalities, children have social group identities based on the families who raise them and the way society views who they are. These identities are both externally applied by the world around them and internally constructed within the child.
Anti-bias educators actively foster children feeling good about all aspects of themselves, including their social identities, without developing a false sense of superiority based on who they are. These teachers recognize that children are injured when they receive messages about themselves that say they are not fully capable and intelligent or when adults become silent in the face of children teasing or rejecting others because of their identities. But despite their best intentions, many teachers carry unconscious biases that impact their behavior and curriculums in ways that are hurtful to childrenâs identity development.
Biases Are Everywhere
Biases are beliefs that affect how individuals think, feel, and act toward others. They lead to acts of individual prejudice and discrimination. Starting in childhood, everyone absorbs and internalizes biases from larger societal attitudes (Bian, Leslie, & Cimpian 2017; Brown et al. 2017). As adults, early childhood teachers bring these ideas consciously or unconsciously into their work (Yates & Marcelo 2014). This is why it is essential for teachers to understand how biases workâand uncover and get rid of their own.
Despite the values individual teachers may hold, such biases influence what happens in early childhood education programs. For example, some teachers may assume families are not interested in their preschoolersâ education because they often miss family conferences, meetings, or other events, without considering that many families are unable to attend due to such factors as the cost of babysitting, lack of available transportation, or inflexible work hours, or that discussions with their childâs teacher are not in the familyâs language.
Biases Are Explicit and Implicit
Sometimes a personâs bias is obvious, or explicit. Explicit biases are undisguised statements. They are attitudes and beliefs about a group of people that are applied to all individuals in the group. Most early childhood educators are sensitive to ex...