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(Unit 4) Topic 1: Cultural Competency and Responsiveness​

3 Clock Hours of Early Childhood Education

Being Aware of Your Own Biases

​Topic 1 Page 14

Being aware of your own biases is one of the most important strategies for ensuring fair treatment of all children in your care.

If you know that you tend to expect boys to get into more trouble on a field trip, you can be intentional about the way you talk about the trip. You can be sure to discuss the rules with all the children, and communicate high expectations for everyone.  ​

​Another key strategy for fairness is really working to get to know each child well. If you have a relationship with all of the children, and you know that one child is likely to have a difficult time on the field trip to the zoo because of a secret fear of snakes, you can devise a strategy to give this child a distracting job to focus on while the group is walking through that area. This is both caring and fair, ensuring that all children have a positive experience, to the best of your ability. 

A final strategy is to question your consistency. A day in an early childhood program is full of small, frequent decisions. Children will be asking your permission or challenging limits often. Before you answer or respond, consider what you have done or said in the past. If your answer to one child is “yes, you can get the yarn out of the cupboard”, and you find yourself about to say “no” to another child asking something similar, ask yourself why. Are the children different ages, and you consistently allow older children to access the cupboard, while younger children need adult help? This might be fair. But if you sometimes allow certain children to access the cupboard when you’re tired, and are feeling like saying “no” now because you are annoyed with this particular child over something that happened earlier, it is not fair. If you operate too often in an inconsistent way, you are likely to be treating children differently based on your unconscious biases. Considering consistency and being honest about your reasons can help you to avoid this pitfall. ​

• ​​Fair Isn’t Equal: Seven Classroom Tips, Edutopia
• Test Yourself for Hidden Bias, Teaching Tolerance
• Why culture matters for  children’s development  and wellbeing. The KidsMatter Early Childhood, Australian Government Department of Health and Ageing​
• What’s Working: Listening to Parents of Color. Allan Golston, Huffpost Education, May 18, 2016 

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