Discussion: Where Are YOU From?

EDUC6357: Diversity, Development, and Learning “Start Seeing Diversity: Introduction”

Program Transcript

NARRATOR: At the Washington Beach Community Preschool, we want our students to be proud of who they are. To be respectful of others. To recognize bias and injustice. And to act, both individually and in cooperation with others, against things that are unfair.

Achieving these goals can be challenging. In our society, many issues divide people. These include age, gender, sexual orientation, family composition, economic class, physical abilities and characteristics, race and ethnicity, and many others.

To explore and challenge bias related to these issues, we've implemented an anti-bias approach in our program. There are eight basic assumptions that guide our work. First, even very young children notice differences and begin to discriminate based on them. While many adults assume children don't notice or discriminate based on the differences they see, experience and research tell us they do. Second, the problem is not that children notice differences, the problem is that our society values some of the differences as positive and sees others as negative, and that children absorb and act on those values.

Third, we do not all experience those biases in the same way. Depending on who we are, different biases support our identity or attack it. When the biases support identity, we often develop, even without realizing it, a feeling that our own knowledge, values, and ways of doing things are better than those of others. The biases deeply affect how people feel about ourselves, and how we feel and act towards others, whether we're conscious of those affects or not.

Fourth, an anti-bias approach is important for all children and children's programs. We are all bombarded by societal bias from movies, television, children's books, family, friends, and many other sources. Fifth, like other adults, teachers are usually unaware of their biases. Therefore, we unintentionally perpetuate them in the environments we create for children. This isn't our fault, and it can be changed. The biases are learned-- they can be unlearned.

Sixth, this is a long term process. Unlearning old ways and developing new ones takes time. Sometimes this process is difficult. Staff members may find that we hold fundamentally different values from one another, or that we have been unknowingly perpetuating bias and stereotypes. We can also support each other as we learn about biases, and increased awareness can open doors to new friendships and experiences.

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Seventh, it's important to create an environment where everyone's participation is sought and valued, and where it's OK to disagree with one another.

FEMALE SPEAKER: That's part of building trust with people: being able to get angry and still talk things out.

NARRATOR: Does this mean every idea or perspective is OK, or that it's all a matter of opinion? No. It means some perspectives are not compatible with an anti-bias approach based on social justice, but there is more than one way that is compatible. Eighth, an anti-bias approach is integrated into every aspect of the program. It's a consideration in everything we do with children, and it's a priority in the work we do together as adults. Staff and family members also do anti-bias work together, including ongoing discussions and activities.

In this video, we show how these eight anti-bias assumptions have affected our program. We want to share what we've learned about how children are affected by bias, and to get other adults thinking and talking about bias in relation to themselves and the children they serve. We want to convey the importance of integrating an anti-bias approach into programs for children, and to show in concrete ways that this is possible in a program without special resources.

Washington Beach Community Preschool is located in a public housing development and faces the problems common to child care programs around the country. There isn't time in this video to show all the activities of a typical day in our program, or to include all of the kinds of bias we think about and try to address. The video does show, through anecdotes and examples, many of the ways we try to infuse an anti-bias perspective throughout an age appropriate program.

The video focuses on preschoolers, but gives a framework that can be used to develop anti-bias work with children of other ages. We hope you will adapt these strategy to make them relevant to the cultures and age groups in your setting. The video is divided into sections which demonstrate ways we have responded to six biases: age, gender, sexual orientation, class, physical abilities and characteristics, and race and ethnicity. The strategies discussed in each section can also be used to address other biases.

Whatever the issue, we begin anti-bias work in the classroom with strategies for building positive individual and group identity. This includes children's identities within a family, as well as their racial, ethnic, class, gender, and physical identities. We find photographs to be an important tool for this purpose. We let the children in our program know that they are important by including photos of them in our materials. For example, we mount children's photos on blocks, tubes,

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or cardboard and use them for dramatic play. Using their own photographs, children learn to recognize, match, and print simple phrases in a lotto game. Children also match their own photographs to name cards.

Activities like these are used throughout the curriculum to help children learn about themselves, and explore the ways they are similar to and different from one another. We have found that it is crucial to focus on similarities and differences that are relevant to the lives of the families and children in our own program. Acknowledging differences lays a foundation for the challenging of bias based on difference.

Here, two children describe each other in front of a small group and find that their skin color is different, but they're both girls.

You will see tools and strategies like these used many times in the sections on specific biases.

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