Dismantle Whiteness in Early Childhood Teacher Preparation

• In Event: Unmasking and Undoing Whiteness: Power, and Praxis across Educational Contexts

Abstract

As teacher educators in early childhood education, we boldly disrupt implicit and explicit hegemonic and antiquated teaching methods. This means moving beyond lecture-based, standardized, and Eurocentric approaches to center the voices and experiences of all our students, particularly students who have been harmed by school systems. We critique and disrupt traditional power structures, encourage critical self-reflection, and create learning environments that embrace multiple ways of knowing, including culturally and linguistically sustaining pedagogies, universal design for learning (UDL), and real-world, community-based knowledge production. Using counternarrative methodology, this paper is organized our counterstories to focus on three distinct areas of disruption within ECTE: (a) relational collective care culture, (b) interruption of power and agency dynamics (c) exposure of and addressed racialized and oppressive realities.

Authors

• Jamie Cho, Seattle University

• Ninderjit Gill, North Seattle College