Racial Justice Conversations With Young Children: Documented Evidence From Two Unique Teachers

• In Event: Amplifying Early Childhood Educator Voices With an Equity Lens

Abstract

Teacher-driven evidence is necessary for evidence-based decision making at all levels of educational policy. And yet, teacher knowledge influences little of what teachers are encouraged, directed, mandated or prohibited from doing in the classroom. This session focuses on the case of young children discussing race, racism and white supremacy in the classroom. Instead of responding to or employing current political campaigns that argue speaking about racism is harmful to young white children, we use data from two classrooms with two different teachers - a Black immigrant novice teacher and veteran white male teacher - to show children’s desires to talk about racism as well as the competencies that teachers foster such conversations and support all participating children.

Young children recognize racial differences at an early age and without intervention (by families, schools and/or communities), will take on societal norms of whiteness and white-centric views of self and history. This presentation draws upon political liberation theory from Charles Mills, who argues that the world is divided into persons and sub-persons with schools being one of the ways this line is maintained. Teachers who are willing to listen to children’s questions and observations about racism and white supremacy are removing this line.

The data for this paper comes from two video-cued ethnographic studies, originated in the Preschool in Three Cultures studies and adapted for the Agency and Young Children study. Video comparative analysis was used to understand the two teachers in relation to one another as well as to many of the political mandates against speaking about race and racism in schools.

Data sources include 80 hours of footage with a specific focus on 16 hours over two days in both classrooms. The transcripts of the video footage as well as the teachers’ and children’s interpretations of the videos from their classroom were analyzed collectively and then comparatively (using Dedoose) with a published list of categories that arose thematically across many sites in the larger society.

Both teachers engaged young children in conversations about racism and diversity with two different picture books in two different ways but had common approaches to personhood and agency in their classrooms. The two teachers’ shared expertise offers evidence that children do want to talk about racism in classrooms, although the entry points for such discussions vary across teachers. Preventing conversations goes against evidence of how children’s identities develop within racist societies and deny teachers the ability to bring their knowledge and own identities into the classroom. In both cases, children expressed a sense of belonging within the classrooms as a direct result of how the teachers set up the discussions. Video examples will be shared from both classrooms in the presentation.

Policymakers who are honestly interested in how children learn will benefit from seeing two examples of age-appropriate and child-initiated conversations about racism and white supremacy by two different teachers. We also believe that video evidence can help teachers validate their own practice and change administrators’ minds about the role of such conversations (as well as the contexts that produce such conversations) in early childhood education.

Author

• Jennifer Keys Adair, University of Texas at Austin
  Presenting Author