Anti-racism in Early Childhood Education: Theory and Practice
This book explores racism and antiracist practice in early childhood education (ECE), exploring how different theoretical lenses can enable students and practitioners to consider the complexity of race and racism in early childhood and education and the impact it has on young children's lives. Written by academics and practitioners based in the USA and the UK, the chapters cover a range of Issues and theories including, race and play, decolonial approaches in ECE, Marxism, critical pedagogy, child-centered pedagogy, pro-Black pedagogies, Black feminist perspectives, critical race theory and immigration. Throughout the book, new conceptualisations of race and anti-racist praxis emerge that have the potential to transform children's lives not only in day to day practice but also one's way of being in the world.
My chapter with Simon:
Diversity in Unity: Developing an Anti-racist Framework within Froebelian Pedagogy
Shaddai Tembo and Simon Bateson
Introduction to our collaborative writing
While broadly aligned through a chance meeting at a conference in 2019, where we shared personal experiences about the role of gender in the early years’ workforce, our initial intentions for collaborative research were quickly overtaken in March 2020.
First, Covid-19 struck and then George Floyd’s murder and the subsequent global resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement pulled our activist energies in a new direction. As we found our feet and reconnected, we shared concerns that emerging discussions about racism in educational spaces remained largely focused on learning resources or responsive interventions to explicit acts of discrimination, rather than being approached through deeper paradigmatic questions and practices. Our ambitions, therefore, were twofold.
First, to examine the relation between Froebelian pedagogy and anti-racism, given that – for reasons we outline below – Froebelian environments potentia ly offer unique territory in which to observe children’s entanglement with colonialism and proto-racialization. Secondly, to develop a practical framework for understanding how race shows up in play through habits which may, in the long run, perpetuate power imbalances between racial groups….
https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/antiracism-in-early-childhood-education-9781350441040/