ABE and Why It Matters

Anti-bias Education and Why It Matters

Anti-bias Education

What is it?

• It is an underpinning perspective and framework that permeates everything in early childhood education:

  • Interactions with children, families, and colleagues

• It is based on the understanding that children are individuals with their own personalities/temperaments with social group identities based on the families who birth and raise them and the way society views who they are

  
  

*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

​Activism

*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

​Justice

Four Core Goals

*Teachers will promote each child's comfortable, empathic 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

Diversity

* 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.

​Identity

Four Core Goals

Poll

Have you personally or professionally observed prejudice or discriminatory practices?

• Yes

• No

Why ABE Matters

• When teachers and families integrate the four ABE goals into teaching and childrearing and engage children in positive, informative conversations about human diversity, children develop the conviction that who they are is valued and important

• When adults help children notice and address unfairness, even very young children are able to be strong and clear in standing up for themselves and others