Practice Brief 86 -- Topics: Equity Background Culture Implementation

How do race and racism connect with science learning in early childhood and elementary classrooms?

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  • -BACKGROUND

Why it Matters to You
  • Educators should engage in reflection about their own racialized experiences, identities, beliefs, and teaching practices, and create opportunities for justice-centered, age-appropriate conversations and explorations of race, racism, and racial justice.
  • District Staff & PD Providers should make resources and spaces available for early childhood and elementary educators to practice facilitating learning about race in their classrooms.
  • Educational Leaders should cultivate school-wide commitments to racial justice learning as relevant and essential to all subject areas, including science.

What Is The Issue?

Early childhood and elementary educators play a critical role in confronting historical and ongoing racial injustices, especially within science learning contexts. Science has been and continues to be complicit in perpetuating systems of oppression against racially and intersectionally marginalized communities. However, scientific knowledges, practices, and learning experiences can also contribute to more just and thriving possibilities for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) youth. Conversations and learning engagements centering race can and should begin in the early childhood and elementary years.

Authors:

BY MELISSA BRAATEN, DANELLE FOSTER, JASON FOSTER, RAE JING HAN, DÉANA SCIPIO & ENRIQUE SUÁREZ (AUTHORS EQUALLY CONTRIBUTED); EDITED BY DEB L. MORRISON & PHILIP BELL


Reflection Questions

  • How are you building an anti-racist learning community in your early childhood or elementary classroom? Who can you build it with?
  • How are you supporting young learners’ sense of belonging, agency, empowerment, and self-determination with regard to issues of racial justice?

Things to Consider

Attending to Equity

Recommended Actions You Can Take



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Work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 Unported License. Others may adapt with attribution. Funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF). Opinions expressed are not those of any funding agency.