HD 390: Developing Anti-bias Curriculum: Teaching Our Values to our Children

Specialization Class Reflection

Although I have had some knowledge of anti-bias education at the community college
level, my knowledge was very minuscule and did not allow apprenticeship with real experiences.
Now, at a higher level learning institution, and home of anti-bias advocate Louise DermanSparks, Pacific Oaks has empowered my understanding in truly developing an anti-bias
approach. I understand anti-bias education as the philosophy of multicultural education while
expanding to include other forms of bias, stereotypes and misinformation. Where anti-bias
education not only addresses race and ethnicity but also includes gender, language, religious
diversity, sexual orientation, physical and mental abilities, family structures, and socio-economic
class. Another key feature to anti-bias is its focus on developing agency for children, to address
injustices.
HD 390: Developing Anti-bias Curriculum: Teaching Our Values to our Children begun
with a learning agenda, a questionnaire we used to measure our knowledge on the topic and our
expectations in the class. I was pleased to be asked what topics that were important to me and
voiced what I hoped the curriculum would cover, such as religion and holidays.
As a way to better understand diversity, I had to search within. Reflecting upon my own
identity brought forward an array of mixed feelings and emotions. It is not easy trying to
decipher personal identity. How I am viewed socially and how I personally view myself not
always coincides.

Gender, my race/ethnicity, the socio-economic class which I am part of, my

able-ness, family configuration, religion, and sexual orientation; all the social identity categories
that define me, intertwine one another. The process of knowing oneself is unending.

In our classrooms we focus so much on ECERs and CLASS, both excellent tools that
assist in our classrooms environment, yet a tool I found as important as these was the Anti-bias
Checklist. While assessing the environment of my classroom utilizing the Anti-bias Checklist
that was presented in the course work, I realized that work needs to be done in order to better
serve children and achieve an anti-bias environment. I was able to see the need for more varied
art displays, such as paintings, sculptures, dance, drawings, and music. I need to increase images
of important people, especially those who have made great advances in social justice, as well as
provide books that challenge unfairness and prejudices and those that encourage children to take
action when faced with unfairness.
As a signature assignment, I was to create a social action project, and my project focused
on exclusion. Armed with knowledge recently acquired on inclusion and anti-bias, I advocated
for a young child in my classroom who was being affected by exclusion. Included in the
assignment were the following components: define a social inequity, provide a background on
why I selected this project, describe the problem/issue, describe the goal of action plan, state the
population served, suggest support or resources I could use to address this inequity, provide a
timeline for implementation, and evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed action plan. For my
project, I created a classroom book, to which every child contributed. I borrowed the motif of
Eric Carles Brown Bear, Brown Bear Who Do You See? picture book. The project served to
include every child in the classroom equally. Upon reading the book, the once excluded child
smiled as his name and picture were shared. I know I gained a lot from this assignment, it is one
I will continue to implement for years to come.
Through this course I now understand that the practical classroom goals I aim to achieve
with an anti-bias curriculum correspond to the stated theory in the book Anti-Bias Education for

Young Children and Ourselves. The four core goals of anti-bias education as described by
Louise Derman-Sparks and Julie Olsen Edwards are: 1) each child will demonstrate selfawareness, confidence, family pride, and positive social identity; 2) each child will express
comfort and joy with human diversity; accurate language for human differences; and deep,
caring human connections; 3) that each child will increasingly recognize unfairness, have
language to describe unfairness, and understand that unfairness hurts; 4) and each child will
demonstrate empowerment and the skill to act, with others or alone, against prejudice and/or
discriminatory actions. (Derman-Sparks, Olsen Edwards, 2012).
I know I cannot change the world, but I know I can make a difference. Every day I teach,
I am taking a political stand. I am changing the direction of the future.

References
Derman-Sparks, L., Olsen Edwards, J. (2012). Anti-Bias Education for Young Children and
Ourselves. United States of America