Dispelling Myths

EDUC6358: Strategies for Working with Diverse Children “Learning about Fairness: Varying Abilities”

Program Transcript

[MUSIC PLAYING]

NARRATOR: Early childhood professionals can create environments in which children recognize and talk about what is fair and what is not fair. In this video, Eric Hoffman and ReGina Chavez discuss how to foster attitudes and interactions of fairness with regard to children who have varying abilities.

ERIC HOFFMAN: When children come into my classroom and they all have varying abilities and some of that is more obvious than others, my goal is to make sure that that child gets introduced to the classroom as a whole person. Because it's really easy for children and others to just focus on, you know, this person is in a wheelchair, or this person has this difference about them and that's all that children see. And of course when children, for example, a child coming in to the classroom with a wheelchair. Of course children are going to have questions about that. But still my focus is always, yes, here's something that's different about this person. And did you know that they love to build with blocks the same way you do? Can you show them where to go to do that in our classroom? I want to connect them on a human level.

And I want to follow the child's lead in talking about those differences. So I'm talking about one child, for example, who came in with a wheelchair, who did not want to talk about the equipment that she had. She had a number of things that she used for moving. And she didn't want to talk about it and I had to really defend her from the questions. No, she doesn't really want to talk about this, but she loves to talk about this, and this, and this, her gardening, and jewelry, the things she liked to play. The child came to me one day and said, I want to talk about my wheelchair at circle time. And so of course I threw out my circle time plan and let her talk. And it turned into a huge-- probably a month-long-- curriculum that we did about different ways that people move. Her place in the classroom hierarchy went way up. And she let people try her wheelchair. She let people check out, she had some braces that she used. She talked about being in the hospital. She would have never done that right at first. We had to get people to accept her as a whole, real person first.

One of the big questions that children start asking as preschoolers is what's fair and what's not fair, what's right and what's wrong, what's good and what's bad. Very interested in fairness, and of course they start out with a very immature idea of what that is. But by helping children discover differences and similarities, and also discover that some people are treated unfairly because of that, my experience is that children immediately jump to, well that's not fair, when they discover somebody being treated unfairly. And so that's my goal in the classroom. To set up activities and to set up conversations where children, on their own, will say wait a minute, there's something not fair about this. We have to take care of this. It's my job to take care of my friend and to stop them from being treated unfairly.

So that's what I'm trying to do with all kinds of different differences in the classrooms. And it comes up particularly around differences in physical abilities because they're so visible to people. How can we help a child gain access to all the classroom? I want to get everybody involved and thinking about that for their friend, for this person that they know.

REGINA CHAVEZ: So the challenge of working with children who have varying abilities, whether it's children with physical differences, or children with learning differences, or children with social emotional differences, the things that we need to know about these children is that typically,

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they're so smart. And that's when the relationship with the parents becomes really important because if we've done that work to partner with the parents then we can talk about these differences and feel safe enough to do so. Because the whole point of an early childhood education environment is to feel safe and supported and loved and to be able to work this stuff out.

And we can look at ourselves first, before we try and change the child's behavior. And I think that that's the most important thing is that-- the thing about anti-bias curriculum is that it's very self- reflective. We need to look at ourselves and figure out how might I be uncomfortable with children's varying abilities? How might I change the routine or the classroom, instead of being so rigid? Anti-bias curriculum really makes you be a little more flexible with your thinking. And so when we're trying to think clearly about children, we really need to do some work on ourselves.

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