What I Have Learned

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.