One hope I have when I think about working
with children and families who come from diverse backgrounds is that educators
would understand that each family is unique in regards to their beliefs,
values, religion, and cultural differences. Furthermore, my hope would be that
every teacher would cherish every family as they are, and support all
children’s families and to foster in each child fair and respectful treatment
of others whose families are different from the child’s own (Denman-Sparks
& Edwards, 2010; Pelo,2008).
One goal I would like to set for the early
childhood field related to issues of diversity, equity, and social justice would
be for children to be ready to stand up for themselves, take what is their
right to have: respect, decent jobs, and education. Racism and other biases are
part of our society and part of what children have to learn to deal with to
become savvy about critical and realistic issues of life (Boutte, 2000;
Denman-Sparks & Edwards, 2010; Harro, 2008). To empower them, children
would be taught to learn and practice a variety of ways to act when another
child acts in a biased manner toward her/him, when one child acts in a biased
manner toward another child, and when an adult acts in a biased manner
(Denman-Sparks & Edwards, 2010). Anti-bias educators would further
deconstruct children’s misconception and would focus on activities for critical
thinking to enable children to make distinctions between inaccurate and
untruthful images and messages and accurate and truthful ones through open
interactions.
A Brief Note of Thanks to My Colleagues
It is hard sometimes to say goodbye but life
is about meeting and going. It has been a wonderful eight weeks together and to
say the least, your contributions in the discussion forum were very insightful.
I learned a lot reading different perspectives which really reflected the theme
for this course. Thanks to those who quickly rendered help to me on
technological issues. I hope each one of you is going out into the field as determined as I am to audaciously
tackle; social injustice, biases, prejudices, heterosexism, racism, ageism,
stereotypes, religionism, able-ism, sexism, and classism in the face and stand
up for justice and equity for all always. I hope your students would be excited
and proud to have one special awesome anti- bias educator and that would be you
to change their lives and make them become great future citizens of the world.
References
Boutte, G. (2008). Beyond the illusion
of diversity: How early childhood teachers can promote
social justice. Social Studies, 99(4),
165-173. Retrieved from the Walden
Library using the Academic Search
Complete database.
Derman-Sparks,
L., & Edwards, J. O. (2010). Anti-bias education for young children and
ourselves. Washington, DC: National Association for the Education of Young
Children (NAEYC).
Harro,
B. (2008). The cycle of Liberation. Retrieve from https://class
waldenu.edu/bbcswebday /institution.
Pelo, A. (Ed.). (2008). Rethinking
early childhood education. Milwaukee, WI: Rethinking Schools.
