Open Collections

Janis, Ashleigh

University of British Columbia

The field of early childhood education is not immune from the racial and colonial politics that encompass the rest of Canadian society. In order to disrupt normalized racial and colonial harms in early learning environments, early childhood educators (ECEs) must first engage with anti-racism education themselves. Within the current study, anti-racism education is defined as any learning opportunity that fosters knowledge, skills, and competencies required to actively disrupt racism, colonialism, and white supremacy through a critical reflection of positionality. Positionality encompasses the various social identity markers that describe who we are and how we understand the world, and can be supported by engaging with and through the arts. The current study first provided anti-racism education to ECEs in British Columbia, then invited white ECEs to engage in a mask-making activity to explore how their positionality influences their ECE teaching praxis. This study used a/r/tography, an arts-based methodology that supports connections between art-making, dialogue, and one another. Through combining anti-racism education and a/r/tography, ECEs were better supported to not only develop an awareness of how racism, colonialism, and whiteness influence the early learning environment, but also develop strategies for disrupting them. Four main themes arose out of their mask-making and dialogue, including: A) Transforming (With) the Power-Full Mask; B) Challenging the Status Quo in Early Childhood Education; C) Indigenous Perspectives; and D) Doing the Work. In turn, ECE teaching praxis benefits from arts-based anti-racism; specifically, through a deeper engagement with and application of anti-racism knowledge, transformation of thought and response to racial, colonial, and white supremacist systems, and a more explicit connection between self–practice.

Text

2025-04-03

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/90571

Human Development, Learning, and Culture

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/