An Acrostic Poem

When I was thinking of what kind of art I am going to use, one of the simple poem style came to my mind. Acrostic poem is one of my favorites, and I often liked to use it with first graders.

Anti-bias is the goal and the core of being an early years teacher for me,

Not treating people by their skin colors or their beliefs, but to get to know people personally to get rid of my learned biases.

Teachers are the examples and models to demonstrate how to treat each other equally and to encourage diversity to be implemented into the curriculum.

International minded and environment are essential for children’s development to become respectful, polite, and open-minded adults in the future,

But the positive and supportive developsment of a child needs the collaboration between the school and the families, which means that the school and the families should work as a team to address the importance of being anti-bias both at school and at home.

Implementing anti-bias curriculum into the existing one can encourage inclusiveness at school and support diversity in the community.

Anti-bias teachers should know their own learned biases, and it is nothing wrong to admit our own biases. It actually can help us to unlearned those biases to become real anti-bias teachers.

Schools should be the places where children feel safe and comfortable, and meanwhile teachers should be sensitive and observant to the children in the class to protect them from and help them out of trauma situations at home.

We do not say those words

The story I am going to share here is from my husband. He grew up in Spokane, and he did not remember to see any diversity when he was a kid. When he was around seven years old, for the first time of his life, he saw an African American child in the park. He was confused, and he stared at that boy. After a while, he asked his mom “ Why is that child so dirty?” His mom was shocked and embarrassed. She paused for a few seconds before she started to respond back to my husband. She smiled to him and said “ That child is not dirty, he just has the different colored skin than ours.” 

Mom talked about the different colors of skins in a soft and gentle voice to make my husband feel it is something normal for people to have different colored skins. She paused before she started to respond, that behaviors made my husband feel his question maybe not appropriate in public. However, after that experience, my husband felt a new world in front of him. He wants to be open and respectful to those people who are different from himself, as he does not want to see any misunderstanding happen again just like what he did in his childhood. He wanted to be the model to show respect to people around him and to help people who are still racist to become anti-biased people. He told me, the experience that conversation with mom in the park was one of the motivations to get him out of the country to work overseas to help more people who are different than him and need help.

As an anti-biased teacher, if it happened to us in the classroom, we could use that as a good entry to introduce diversity to children. That would be a good lesson for children to know there is nothing wrong to be different from others. We could have an activity to share the photos from each family in the class, and talk about the similarities and differences. Teachers also can share the personal experiences with children about skin colors and diversity. It would be helpful to invite children to try to look at things with a different perspective , to learn something new about the human experience and be open-minded to the idea” Do people choose their colors? Is is better to be one color than another?” (Pelo, 2008). It would be a good and real experience for children to talk about it and to see it as a whole picture with other children and the teacher. Children will hopefully gain the idea to feel proud of who they are.

References

A. Pelo (2008). Rethinking Early Childhood Education