Practicing the Awareness of Microaggressions

              I had the opportunity this week to go to a conference with people from twelve western states (including Hawaii and Alaska), as well as people from America Samoa, Guam, and the Mariana Islands. The purpose of the conference was to talk about what states were doing in their Early Childhood Professional Development Systems to support teachers to prepare children for school readiness. We were discussing the tools that are widely accepted as reliable for determining quality in classrooms and programs, when the representative from Alaska spoke up. She mentioned that native children are not talk to interact in the same way that Caucasian children are-they are talk to listen as their way of learning. One of the widely accepted tools to measure interactions between teachers and children does not take this cultural difference into consideration, and the scores of the native teachers and children in Alaska were low. Not because they had poor interactions, but because they had different interactions than those being measured. This nationally renowned tool was a microaggression to this leader and the native people in her state because it says that their way of interacting is not worthwhile. Although the tool is meant to be a support for teachers, and no malice was put into the design, it has unintentionally caused this community an indignity.

            This observation has helped me realize that many things that are designed to benefit “all” children in the U.S. have been designed by White, middle/upper class, educated people-and they are piloted on the same demographic. We, as Early Childhood leaders need to be willing to step out of our reality and realize that our world is changing. I will take the lesson learned from my colleague in Alaska and ask myself if what I am sending out to the providers in Utah, in regards to Professional Development, are truly taking many right ways of doing what is best for children.