Using Anti-Racist Pedagogy in EC Teacher Preparation Programs

• In Event: Anti-Racism in Early Childhood Education

Abstract

Early childhood education has been guided, framed, and informed by Eurocentric and white ways of knowing and being (Nxumalo, 2016; Souto-Manning, 2022). Pérez (2020) wrote of the “white standards of childhood” (p. 23) omnipresent and woven throughout early childhood education. Templeton and Cheruvu (2020) described how the curricula of early childhood are grounded in settler colonialism, informed by deficit thinking about Communities of Color. These hegemonic ways of knowing and being have historical legacies that are deeply entrenched and difficult to challenge, yet anti-racist approaches to early childhood education offer possibility and hope (Escayg, 2019, 2020). We also recognize that the early childhood education workforce continues to be majority women and majority white (Whitebook, 2018). Vittrup (2016) described how resistant many white educators and parents are to engage in critical reflection and action related to race and racism. As a result, as three white women early educators, we take seriously the ethical imperative for our responsibility to interrupt harmful practices. We worked together as early childhood professionals in this study, to commit to anti-racist pedagogies and practices, while exploring the challenges we encountered along the way.

In this critical collaborative autoethnography (Ashlee et al., 2017; Bhattacharya, 2008), we explored how anti-racism is lived and practiced in our different but interconnected early childhood contexts. Two theoretical frames guided our work, Critical Race Theory (CRT) and Critical whiteness Studies (CwS). We intentionally centered an approach that remained critical of whiteness. We challenged social reproductions of whiteness (Nayak, 2007) by critiquing our experiences and working towards anti-racist informed pedagogical practices. Inspired by Tiffany Jewell’s (2020) work on anti-racism in education, we organized our results through two themes: calling in and calling out. As Jewell described: “If you call someone in, you circle back to a hurtful or oppressive comment they made in private. If you call someone out, you let them know their comment was hurtful in a public space” (p. 112).Throughout our learning and work together, we recognized how embodying anti-racist pedagogy and praxis happens in both actions.

In our presentation, we share examples from the two themes in becoming anti-racist practitioners. We describe how we drew on the tools of calling in and calling out in different contexts, noting that we also had to be open to be called in and called out as well. We share two significant contributions: developing and maintaining critical collaboratives and centering accountability. By developing and maintaining critical collaboratives to work for educational change, we recognized how challenging and interrupting white supremacy is difficult to sustain if it occurs in isolation, and we recount how collaboratives can sustain anti-racist work. In centering accountability, we explain the importance of this practice within anti-racist critical collaboratives. Through our study, we recognized that bringing our difficult and complex dilemmas to each other, as well as being open to ways we could learn and grow from scholars and scholarship in our field, maintained our commitment to anti-racist practices and also heightened our knowledge.

Authors

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

• Amanda Welch, California State University - Los Angeles

• Juliette Marie Lahey, Community Action Partnership San Luis Obispo