Analyzing Real-World Scenarios

EDUC6358: Strategies for Working with Diverse Children “Learning About Fairness Race and Gender”

Program Transcript

[MUSIC]

NARRATOR: Early childhood professionals must create environments where it is safe for children to talk about diversity, ask questions, and offer opinions. Listen as educators Leslie Cheung, Eric Hoffman, and ReGina Chavez, share their thinking and experiences about young children, race, and gender.

LESLIE CHEUNG: In the young children's classroom, race and gender comes up quite a bit. Children are at an age typically, in zero to five, that is discovering I'm a boy, and I'm a girl. And wow my skin color is different from your skin color, why is that? How come Bobby's skin looks like chocolate, but mine looks like this apricot? And why does Joey have a penis, and I don't?

And a lot of these questions come up. And there's a lot of stereotypes and biases that come along with this. And sometimes that's a trickle down from the way a family thinks about certain things. Maybe a religion that they are a part of, an experience they may have had. I have worked with families that have two moms, have two dad's, who have one mom, one dad.

So as children are making these discoveries, parents don't always know how to react. Sometimes teachers don't always know how to react. When a child's sitting at the toilet and all of a sudden looks over and says, oh well you look different. And everyone gets startled, grown-ups get startled. We're experienced, we've been around this. We've had experience looking at racism, and looking at gender, and looking at sexual orientation, and looking at all of these pieces in our society that impact our children. And then in the classroom, you have something very simple in front of you. Very simple, it's simply noticing differences. And that's all the children are doing, without bias. It's us who bring that in going, oh you shouldn't say that. But they should, they should say that. They should say, well my skin colors different from yours. And you say, it is. Your skin looks like apricot or peach, and Bobby's looks like milk chocolate. Isn't that beautiful?

ERIC HOFFMAN: Preschool children are so interested in how the world works, they're trying to figure it out. And one of the things that they look at is, how do we categorize people? And more importantly, which categories have strong emotions attached to them? And gender and race are two of the big ones. Preschoolers are particularly interested in gender, it's one of what I call their big questions. What does it mean to be a boy, what does it mean to be a girl? Am I always going to be that gender? If I'm a boy, do I have to behave in certain ways? Can I play with girls? These are all important questions for preschoolers.

And again I try not to step in and say, you're wrong about your beliefs. Preschoolers are trying to take the best information they can, and they come up with these judgments about the world that are often incorrect. My job is to give them real experiences, not lectures, but real experiences that might contradict the stereotypes that they've come up with. So I had children who were telling girls that they couldn't play basketball, because they were girls. I happened to have one of the parents who was on the college basketball team, the women's basketball team, she brought a few of her teammates over, they did a dribbling and shooting demonstration. And that was the end of that talk. And all of my talk to the children wouldn't make a difference, but then having real people that they watched made a difference. There were still some children who insisted that girls couldn't play it, but it lasted about two weeks before everybody agreed that well, of course girls can play basketball.

Page 1

So looking at these big things that adults are often afraid to talk about, children are not afraid to talk about it. They want to talk about it, they want to talk about gender, they want to talk about skin color, and it's our job to make it safe for them. Partly it's by not just jumping into that, but creating this atmosphere of we've talked about all these ways people are similar and different. And we're celebrating all of it. And skin color, and other racial issues, gender, those are all things that we're going to keep celebrating. And they're not huge things to worry about.

One of the things that I like to do is to use dolls and puppets to bring up these issues. Because I can talk about some of the stereotypes children hold, without talking about specific children. And I find that children really want to talk about those with dolls and puppets that they think are alive, and part of their classroom. So one of the things I did was to have a boy doll who liked to wear pink. And I can tell you that I had to break up fist fights about this, and to keep the discussion safe. But it was an incredible discussion. With children saying yes, he can do that. No he can't. It really brought out what the underlying issues were.

REGINA CHAVEZ: If I walked into a classroom and I pretended that race and gender didn't exist, if I just deconstructed everything and was like that's a social construction. And I'm going to ignore that in my classroom. I would be doing a disservice to my children and to the families. Because it's the world that we live in. Where race, class, gender, those things are socially constructed. And it's part of the world that we live in. And knowing that, my job as an educator, I get to help children and families navigate how we're going to interact with that in our classroom and in our space. And how to make children and families feel safe, and worthy, and loved. No matter what their race, or class, or gender may be. But the human experience is messy and complex, and our responsibility as educators is to help children navigate that. Because they're learning so much. And so they get to learn all about this fascinating world, and children have a really inherent sense of what's fair and what's not fair.

And in my classroom, one of the activities that we've done around gender specifically, we had these capes. And there was one pink one. And this little girl was saying, boys cannot wear the pink cape. And the thing about teaching young children is you need to be patient, and wait for the teachable moment. And so it was great, because we got to build curriculum around it. We got to read Heroes and Heroines by Eric Hoffman. I got to do my final board story, and have the characters out. And so I had Juan, and he was wearing the pink cape. And Carmenita was saying, you cannot wear the pink cape. And Juan would tell her, I can wear the pink cape and you can use it when I'm done. In your classroom, you can build stuff around that.

Page 2