Abstract
Last year, as protests against racial injustice and police brutality spread across the United States and beyond after the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery, the demand for books about race and antiracism internationally soared. The following were among the best-selling books on Amazon in 2020:
Coates, T. (2015). Between the world and me. One World.
Eddo-Lodge, R. (2019). Why I’m no longer talking to white people about race. Bloomsbury Publishing.
Kendi, I. X. (2019). How to be an antiracist. One World.
DiAngelo, R. (2018). White fragility: Why it’s so hard for white people to talk about racism. Beacon Press.
Oluo, I. (2019). So you want to talk about race. Seal Press.
Saad, L. (2020). Me and white supremacy: Combat racism, change the world, and become a good ancestor. Sourcebooks.
Persons are seeking a broader and deeper understanding of concepts of racism. They are realizing that racism goes beyond overt discriminatory words and behaviors—they are developing awareness of instances of systemic racism and microaggressions. Microaggression is a term used for brief, commonplace, and daily verbal, behavioral, or environmental indignities, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative attitudes toward stigmatized or culturally marginalized groups. The persons making the comments may be otherwise well-intentioned and unaware of the potential impact of their words. In January 2021, the American Speech–Language–Hearing Association (ASHA) offered four 30-min mini-courses on microaggressions. The goal of the speaker, Noma Anderson, was to walk viewers through different perspectives on experiencing microaggressions, with the purpose of increasing our self-awareness of microaggressions and how we contribute and respond to them. Although these webinars are no longer available for free, if you are a subscriber to ASHA Learning Pass, you have access to them. I highly recommend these webinars. (The microaggression examples are primarily of university students.)
Children are not immune to the effects of recent events or to experiencing microaggressions. The concerns about racism seemed to have intensified last year but are not new. Personal and societal racism affect the identity development of all children. A positive self-identity is dependent on effective communication skills. Although speech-language pathologists (SLPs) are not typically responsible for implementing a school curriculum per se, they are responsible for the communication skills that children require to access the curriculum. In teaching those skills, they can use materials that promote children’s identity development. A number of websites offer suggestions for how to discuss racial issues and microaggressions with children. The National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) has been advocating for an antibias curriculum for young children for nearly 40 years. In 1989, NAEYC published Anti-Bias Curriculum: Tools for Empowering Young Children (Derman-Sparks, 1989), which has become a classic text on the topic. In 2020, they published the most recent variation of this book, Anti-Bias Education for Young Children and Ourselves (Derman-Sparks et al., 2020). The book is geared to preschool children, but the examples and content are relevant through early elementary.
The antibias curriculum proposed by NAEYC has four goals that are intended “to identify and prevent, as much as possible, the harmful emotional and psychological impacts on children and societal prejudice and bias” (Derman-Sparks et al., 2020, p. 4). Goals for both teachers and children are listed (pp. 15–17):
Identity
Teachers will nurture each child’s construction of knowledgeable and confident personal and social identities.
Children will demonstrate self-awareness, confidence, family pride, and positive social identities.
Diversity
Teachers will promote each child’s comfortable, empathetic interaction with people from diverse backgrounds.
Children will express comfort and joy with human diversity, use accurate language for human differences, and form deep, caring connections across all dimensions of human diversity.
Justice
Teachers will foster each child’s capacity to critically identify bias and will nurture each child’s empathy for the hurt bias causes.
Children will increasingly recognize unfairness (injustice), have language to describe unfairness, and understand that unfairness hurts.
Activism
Teachers will cultivate each child’s ability and confidence to stand up for oneself and for others in the face of bias.
Children will demonstrate a sense of empowerment and the skills to act, with others or alone, against prejudice and/or discriminatory actions.
Although NAEYC focuses on young children, these goals are applicable across all ages. In its Anti-Bias Framework, Teaching Tolerance employs these same four goals for students from kindergarten through 12th grade. This framework can be downloaded for free from: http://www.tolerance.org/sites/default/files/general/Anti%20bias%20framework%20pamphlet.pdf. The Teaching Tolerance antibias framework provides detailed student objectives for each of the four goals. SLPs can consider how they can incorporate these goals into therapeutic communication goals.
The NAEYC book seeks to promote children’s identities. The authors begin by a discussion of the distinction between personal identity and social identity. Personal identity includes factors such as name, personality, talents, interests, age, and relationships with family members. Social identity refers to the significant group categories that are created and defined by the society in which people live. In individual chapters, the NAEYC curriculum addresses diversity in culture, race, gender, ableness, economic class, and family structure. The authors explain why an antibias curriculum is essential if children are to develop to their fullest potential. Much of the content in the chapters is framed by statements made by children or stories of specific families. The focus is on how to respond to the children when their statements are factually incorrect or problematic in some way, for example, Vivian, an African American girl, lived with a White woman for a while. Her closest friend at school asked Vivian if she would become White if she lived with Anna long enough. When I play with dolls, do I become a girl? I don’t want to be Black anymore. I want to be like the people on Emergency! when I grow up.
One chapter addresses strategies for establishing relationships with families, both supporting families who value an antibias curriculum and knowing how to respond to those who do not. What does one do when a parent says, “I do not want my child sitting next to or playing with any Arab children?’ “I don’t want my daughter playing with a Black doll. I know she’s only 4, but that can lead to interracial dating and marriage.”
In each chapter, specific teaching strategies and activities are suggested. Questions are also provided to have readers think about their experience and attitudes, for example, As a child, were you ever the target of racial teasing or slurs? Did you ever observe someone else being the target of such attacks. Did anyone talk with you about what to do in that situation? Do you have a memory of a time when an adult helped you sort out confusing or frightening experiences or ideas about race? Can you remember a time when you wished an adult would help you sort out these experiences but didn’t? As an adult, what, if anything, do you do when you see or hear racial prejudice? What would you like to do instead of what you do or don’t do?
I find York’s book, Roots and Wings (2016), a good complement to the NAEYC Anti-Bias Curriculum book. It has a more narrow orientation than the NAEYC antibias curriculum, focusing specifically on issues of racism, prejudice, and oppression. The first half of the book provides a foundation for factors underlying the need for an antibias curriculum. One chapter describes the stages of racial awareness and development of pre-prejudice/prejudice from infancy to age 12. York claims that after age 10, racial attitudes tend to stay constant unless the child experiences a life-changing event. Research makes it clear that young children pick up prejudice and stereotypes about themselves and other people simply as a part of trying to make sense of their world. Without intervention, these misconceptions will not change. Another chapter is devoted to identification of structural and systemic racisms in early childhood educational programs, the development of a racial identity, and the effects of racism on both BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) children and White children. York describes the European American worldview that typically underlies early childhood programs, how the worldviews of families from other cultural backgrounds may differ from those of the school, and how these differences may result in conflicts between educators and families.
The second half of the book describes strategies for implementing a culturally relevant antibias curriculum. York uses the same four goals that are the foundations for the NAEYC curriculum and the Teaching Tolerance antibias framework. She provides a detailed list of objectives for each goal and lists of books to teach a variety of antibias concepts that reflect the cultures and identities of preschool and elementary school children from culturally/linguistically diverse backgrounds. She suggests considerations in selecting appropriate materials. The last chapter contains many specific activities geared to preschool–kindergarten children for each of the four antibias curriculum goals. Each chapter ends with a Dig Deeper section with links to websites for additional information on the topic and a Videos section with links to songs and YouTube videos. (I was able to download a digital version from the university library. In the digital version, I can click on the link to go directly to the websites.)
These two books provide a good foundation for understanding the principles of antibias education. Although these books focus on strategies for young children, the principles they introduce are applicable across all ages. Hence, I find it helpful to first read these books even if you are working with older students. Antibias materials on the Teaching Tolerance website (tolerance.org) employ the same goals and objectives as the Derman-Sparks and York books but are focused on older school-age students.