An Experimental Collaborative Autoethnography for Social Transformation: Confronting Whiteness in Ourselves as Early Childhood Educators

• In Event: Disrupting Discourses of White Supremacy in Early Childhood Education

Abstract

Objective
This paper explores the truths we have interrogated through our experiences as early childhood educators, and insights we have developed as white women early educators who have sought to centralize teaching and learning about race/racism in our early childhood teaching spaces. As we pursued the creation of equitable spaces for young children, we have wrestled with our own biases and challenges around talking/teaching about race and racism. We recognize that a dual focus must be on our own responsibility and our pedagogical commitments.

Theoretical Frameworks
Critical Race Theory (CRT)
Building upon Ladson-Billings (2013) and Author1 (2019), we are working with CRT in order to centralize race and racism in early childhood education settings. We aim to challenge the status quo and CRT guides us in theorizing racism as a normative component of everyday life. CRT’s commitment to social justice praxis has led our work together (Parker & Villapando, 2007).

Critical whiteness Studies
Building from and within CRT, Critical whiteness Studies (CwS) has also informed our research (Applebaum, 2016; Corces-Zimmerman & Guida, 2019; Matias & Boucher, 2021). We intentionally centered a perspective that remained critical of our whiteness as the essential ideology that brought us together. As white women educators, we challenge the social reproduction of structural whiteness (Nayak, 2007) by critiquing our experiences and working towards identifying anti-racist informed pedagogical practices.

Modes of Inquiry and Data
We engaged in critical collaborative autoethnography (Ashlee et al., 2017; Bhattacharya, 2008). Autoethnography, as a method, explores how the self has been constructed over time and significant moments which have led to this assemblage. As white women educators and researchers who study race/ism, we claim our responsibility by placing the eye of our focus upon ourselves. We recognize that by attending to how whiteness and white supremacy has and continues to operate, we must make clear that white people are racialized beings who have clear choices to enact racism in covert and overt ways or commit to anti-racism as pedagogy and practice. The data presented are critical moments which brought about questions and relationalities in challenging white supremacy in ECE and present strategies of what anti-racism can look like in early childhood.

Insights and Scholarly Significance
The three contributions of our paper are: First, the importance of collaboration and collective work. Disrupting white supremacy cannot happen in isolation. In our paper we share practices which support us in a continuous engagement with anti-racist frameworks. Second, we share how accountability with our students and colleagues keeps our commitment to anti-racism active. In our paper we describe how recognition of our students as equitable counterparts guided our work towards transformation. Last, we reject the neoliberal and colonizing project of reading, thinking, and writing to confirm what is already known and convey secure meaning, which we recognize as a Eurocentric approach. Instead, we disrupt white centric ideologies through critical humility and reflexive pedagogical practices. These insights are in line with interrogating the harmful ‘truths’ held in early childhood teacher education and research and providing new possibilities.

Authors

• Oona Fontanella-Nothom, California State University - Dominguez Hills
  Presenting Author

• Amanda Welch, California State University - Los Angeles
  Presenting Author

• Juliette Marie Lahey, Community Action Partnership San Luis Obispo
  Presenting Author