Diversity Everyday

Recently, a few blogs popped up in my feed on the importance of talking about race with young children. This is not always an easy topic for families or educators, especially white families and educators. As a white teacher, I have had a long journey of coming to understand race and diversity in my own life and in the life of the children in my classroom. Critical to my understanding of how to talk about these issues with young children is the book, Anti-Bias Education for Young Children and Ourselves, and the older Anti-Bias Curriculum. They outline a very simple and developmentally appropriate (which are, of course, the magic words) to developing all children's ability to recognize and counter bias in our culture.
This can be hard for parents to think about, and harder still for them to talk to young children about. But it is very necessary. In the somewhat tongue-in-cheek blog post, How To Raise Racist Kids, Jonathan Liu points out that the single best way to perpetuate bias is:

Don’t talk about race. Don’t point out skin color. Be “color blind.”

He offers evidence and reasearch to back this up, and then point us on to five tips for talking about racism with kids.

The other day, I was having a conversation with a prospective parent (who was white) about the importance of a diverse environment for young children to learn, "especially in today's world," a refrain I often hear. I enthusiastically agreed with him, adding, however, that simply being in a diverse environment does not teach young children to understand and resist the prejudice that subtly (and not always so subtly) infiltrates our society. We must do what we may not have been taught do to (especially if we are white), and talk about it, everyday, even if it is awkward, or we don't get it just right the first time. Because Black history isn't important just one month of the year, and understanding identity, diversity, and bias don't just happen magically.

What about you? What messages did you get about race as a little person? Was it okay to talk about?
If you have kids, what happens at your house? Does your child talk about race? Do you feel comfortable talking with them about race? Do you talk with other families about race? 
If you are an educator, do you feel comfortable talking with your students about race? Do you get support for these conversations?

What is Meanness? Jumping into the Unknown with Emergent Social Curriculum

So for a while, my assistant teacher and I have been working with our class of 3 and 4 year olds to find ways to solve problems, and to be kind to each other. As is very typical for three and four year olds, however, many children have been experimenting with inclusion and exclusion and what it means to be friends. It seemed like we had been handling the incidents on a case by case basis, often stepping in as adults to resolve the problem. As the teachers thought about this, and how it was affecting the mood of the classroom, we decided to take a new and different approach. We decided to bring the problem to the children, and see if we could investigate the problem. We are calling it: The Meanness Problem. Like many of our projects, this undertaking is not one that we have done before, so we do not have a concrete map of where we are going. Rather we have guiding research questions that we have presented to the children:

What is meanness? How do you know if something is mean? Where is all the meanness coming from? 

We started the project today with a GIANT piece of paper, to symbolize how this was a big big problem. On this paper, we will write our observations about meanness. In our first discussion today, the children sat with rapt attention, and had many ideas about meanness. They clearly had experienced the meanness, and knew many many ways to say mean words. We studiously wrote down the children's ideas. "Meannes is liek when you say, 'You can't come to my birthday party,'" "When you say that you're not my best friend anymore," or "When somebody tells somebody that they are not gong to play cars anymore." They suggested drawing a mean face so we would know what the writing was about, and so we drew a mean face with slanted eyebrows and "mean teeth." We asked them to help us do the research together, and anytime somebody said or did something mean, we would write it on the paper to gather our data on meanness. In our next meeting, we will ask the children how we can learn more about the meanness.

This is a different approach to the social issues of three and four year olds than we as teachers typically take. My assistent and I have had discussions about the best way to talk about this problem with the children, and we have spoken with other educators as well. She is eager to do a corollary niceness project, while I am interested in following the thread of meanness to see if we can uncover more information about where this problem is coming from. We will find ways to pursue both avenues, finding ways to document both the problem, and how the children are thinking about solving it through teamwork, cooperation, and kindness. I want to figure out how they understand the meanness in the room, and how they think that we can dispell it. I want the children to own this problem. Only then can we start to figure out how to get it out. One child said, "Where is all this meanness coming from? It's a mystery!" And there is nothing that this class loves move than a mystery to solve!
As adults, it can feel uncomfortable to dwell on the negative emotions that exclusion in play can bring up for us, and it can be tempting to jump to the opposite of kindness. This exploration of exclusion is a fundemental part of child development, and it feels like we have a group of children with the social intelligence to tackle this problem head on, dealing directly with the "mean" and think about how it is affecting the individuals and the group. We are interested to see where this goes and how the class will figure out how to solve the problem. We also encouraged the families to have conversations with their child about the subject and to share any thoughts that they have with us so we can add it to our research.
What about you, dear reader? Do you remember being mean as a young child? Or someone being mean to you? Can you help us with our research on meanness?

Taking Risks

As a teacher of young children, I often extoll the virtues of taking risks as a crucial way of learning. It is easy to see how a child attempting to balance a block on a tall tower, jump from high step or speak in Morning Meeting can lead to learning and growing.
It is scarier to think about taking risks as a teacher. Some people expect teachers to be an authority, to know for certain the answers. But that is not the kind of teacher I am, nor is it the kind of learner I want to model for the children. I know that through taking risk, I learn and grow and that the dialectical process of reflection and action that Paulo Freire calls praxis takes place.

So what does it mean for a teacher to take risks? What are the conditions that need to exist for teacher, children, or any kind of learner to take a risk? To take risks means that I will try new things, new ways of teacher and learning, and that I will reflect and learn from the new experience. To take a risk means that I will fail, that I will make mistakes, and that I have the chance to learn from these mistakes. It means that I have to have the support of my colleagues and supervisors and the trust of the children's families. And I have to trust myself.

This summer, I attended a conference at the Boulder Journey School in Boulder Colorado. Several of the teachers at the school gave presentations about how taking risks had lead to professional growth. For some of them, this meant trying new things in the classroom, like painting a huge wall with magnetic paint, only to realize that the magnetic paint wasn't strong enough to hold the magnets they had planned to use to make ramps and tunnels with the children. For another teacher (who was used to actively engaging with the children and directing play) taking a a risk meant sitting back and observing the children more closely to see what they were learning and exploring without her intervention.
At my school, we work on an emergent curriculum, which each year at the beginning of school, this feels incredibly risky. New families, nervous about their child's first school experience or their kindergarten readiness, don't have the reassurance of a prescribed curriculum, and while I can offer them the knowledge that we teach all the necessary skills during the course of the year (and follow the PA Early Learning Standards), I cannot tell them that we will be studying pumpkins in October and rain forests in January. I trust that we as classroom teachers will observe the children's interests, foster their curiosity, and spin these pieces into new explorations, studies, and projects.

With this blog, I hope to take risk another kind of risk. I hope to share my learning process with a community of families, teachers, thinkers, and learners. I hope to be candid about my risks, my successes and failures, and my learnings.