Each and Every Child

Using an Equity Lens When Teaching in Preschool

Susan Friedman, Alissa Mwenelupembe, Susan Friedman, Alissa Mwenelupembe

• Publisher: The National Association for the Education of Young Children
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781938113628
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Early Childhood Education

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.

PART 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 child’s unique strengths and support the full inclusion of all children—given 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 child’s behavior in the classroom deviates from a teacher’s expectations, the teacher might look for tools to change or manage that behavior. But sometimes children’s 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 child’s 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 child’s 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 didn’t notice in the heat of the moment? How can you make sure your own biases aren’t 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 person’s 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

Louise Derman-Sparks and Julie Olsen Edwards, with Catherine M. Goins

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 teacher’s 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 security—the services necessary for children’s healthy development. They also generate messages and actions that directly and indirectly reinforce harmful ideas and stereotyping and that undermine children’s 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 children’s 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 work—and 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 preschoolers’ 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 child’s teacher are not in the family’s language.

Biases Are Explicit and Implicit

Sometimes a person’s 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...