Article Link: http://exchangepress.com/article/what-kind-of-human-do-you-want-to-be-teacher-identities-in-anti-bias-education/5026034/
*Photos can be found in the pdf version of this article.
As we mentor early childhood teachers seeking to live out their ethical commitments to children, we find that teachers settle in comfortably to Anti-Bias Goal #1, “to nurture each child’s construction of knowledgeable and confident personal and social identities” (Derman-Sparks, Edwards & Goins, 2020, p. 15). In contrast, many teachers neglect to consider not only who they are in the world, but also how these social identities shape their role as teachers and their relationships with children and families. Not surprisingly, this dynamic is especially evident for White teachers, but it also happens to those with other dominant identities by gender, social class, language, and so on. When teachers do share their dominant identities in the classroom, it is often cloaked in the unconscious assumption that everyone in their community shares a similar history and background.
Social identities are “significant group categories that are created and defined by the society in which people live. These include culture, economic class, family structure, gender, language, race, religion and more” (pg. 25). These intersecting identities are both imposed on us to define differential access to power, and also embraced by us as part of how ...