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Emotions, Differences and Social Justice
March 22, 2023
“Our emotional life maps our incompleteness...A creature without any needs would never have reasons for fear, or grief, or hope, or anger.”
-Martha Nussbaum
-Martha Nussbaum
In the Ed.Flicks video “Social Justice in Early Learning,” Tashon McKeithan, Lead Director of Early Care and Education at UCLA, makes a key connection between developing our emotional vocabulary and developing tolerance for and appreciation of differences: “We actually don't have language around emotions because we just haven't been taught that. So part of this is being able to give children language around emotions so they can delineate how they're feeling and how they're interacting with each other.”
For McKeithan, this includes “thinking about anti-bias and social justice, listening to children's perspectives and then creating spaces for them to explore what they’re saying, because children at age three or even younger begin to understand difference. And how we're talking about difference is very important to how they are going to frame their ideas around people, and people that are different. And so it's really important to normalize that conversation when they are young.”
Returning to developing our emotional vocabulary, McKeithan continues, “This is going to sound very strange, but it's not our role to make children feel happy all the time. It's really to teach them how to navigate their emotions when they have them. And so it is okay to be frustrated and disappointed and sad.” The key isn’t to downplay those emotions, but to help children learn to recognize and navigate them.
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Comments (2)
Displaying All 2 CommentsEugene, OR, United States
Great point, Francis. Self reflection is at the root of all good teaching, in my view. And whatever we as adults ask of children, we ought to do ourselves first, with authenticity.
University of Phoenix/ Red Rocks Community College
Denver, Colorado, United States
Yes, it's critical that we empower young children to talk about differences, especially people who are different. However, my experience raising four biracial children (who many unfortunately still see as "different") is that the problem is not the children, it's the adults (in the room): teachers, other parents, professors, administrators, and even systems (i.e., federal demographic forms and busing laws). Why do we always put this problem on our children? Because we can't solve it?
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