But, I don’t believe it’s about race’: Challenging fallacies of race and racism amongst early childhood educators in Ontario

There is the continued belief that children do not see race and that they are racially innocent. This belief is evidenced in early childhood environments and influences the practices of the instructors in these settings. However, research continues to show that children do see and react to varying markers of race. This research project focused on early childhood educators’ interpretations of children’s racially coded behaviours and interactions. The results revealed four central themes: racial evasiveness; racial dis-ease; parental role in promoting racism; and limited educational preparation. This study contributes to the growing body of research on children, race, and early childhood by examining how Canadian early childhood educators address race and racism in the classroom. Despite the ample body of literature documenting children’s perceptions of difference, and racial difference in particular, a common assumption persists among early childhood educators and layperson alike: that is, children are “racially innocent” (Escayg, 2019c). Broadly construed, such a belief implies that racism, discrimination, and prejudice are not significant facets of a child’s life, yielding little or no influence on how they see, value, and respond to themselves and others. However, there has been ongoing research that challenges this conception and demonstrates that, because children learn about life from the messages and cues around them, they become racially aware (Husband, 2012; McCown, 2004; Van Ausdale & Feagin, 1996; 2001; Wright, 2011) and develop racial biases quite early (Aboud, 2003; Aboud & Amato, 2001; Cristol & Gimbert, 2008;Nesdale & Flesser, 2001;). One common explanation for the disconnect between teachers’ perceptions and children’s lived racialized experiences and actions, implicates the scope and content of their professional training programs. Indeed, early childhood teacher training—as well as the field of early childhood education— have yet to fully transgress the disciplinary boundary of child development (Ryan & Grieshaber; 2005; Soto & Swadener, 2002). The continued emphasis on child development, without equal consideration of other disciplinary perspectives, however, limits how pre-service educators conceptualize the teaching and learning process and how they interpret the meaning and realities of racism in the Canadian context—and in the lives of young children. The lack of exposure to and practice with anti-racist pedagogy, combined with educators’ naïve views of children, result in classroom spaces that are neither inclusive nor empowering. More pointedly, such a classroom space, typified by the absence of discussions about race, racism, and curriculum, and that which fails to promote conversations about identity and equity (see, for example, Gaias, Gal, Abry, Taylor, & Granger, 2018), reinforces and normalizes White privilege, while supplanting more critically, racially just pedagogies. Accordingly, we argue for anti-racist teaching in early childhood education. Recognizing the genesis of children’s racial self-identification and attitudes, and the ways in which children display their racial attitudes (for a review on Canadian children, see, for example, Escayg, Berman, & Royer, 2017), is central to cultivating particular elements of an anti-racist early years pedagogy: professional practices that not only support positive racial identity development, especially among children of color, but also those which assist young White children in dismantling nascent beliefs and or practices that stem from the myth of White superiority. 14 Daniel and Escayg: "But I don't believe it's about race" Published by DigitalCommons@UNO, 2019 Drawing on the conceptual tenets of Critical Race Theory, this paper reports on Canadian early childhood educators’ interpretations of children’s racialized behavior in the classroom. We first begin by exploring the theoretical framework of the study, drawing specific attention to the theoretical constructs that are consistent with the goals of the study and the research design. To provide the appropriate contextual framing, however, we offer a discussion on race and racism in the Canadian context and the connections to the preparation of ECEs. In the remaining sections of the paper, we discuss the research design, findings, and implications for ECE education and in-service professional training. Theoretical Framework: Critical Race Theory Critical race theory emerged out of the civil rights era and was developed by academics such as Derrick Bell (1987), Kimberlè Crenshaw (1995; 2011), Richard Delgado (1989), and Mari Matsuda (1993), to name a few. The theory was based on explicating the inherent relationship between race and racism and their embeddedness in laws and legal policies and which impacted the judicial decisions that were made. Further to this, critical race theory examines the way in which race, in conjunction with laws and legal policies, implants and maintains a hierarchy of White privilege. Solórzano and Yosso (2002) indicate that: . critical race theory in education is a framework or set of basic insights, perspectives, methods, and pedagogy that seeks to identify, analyze, and transform those structural and cultural aspects of education that maintain subordinate and dominant racial positions in and out of the classroom. (p. 25) According to CRT theorists, gender, class and other social identities are added sites of intersecting and overlapping oppression and marginalization and must be considered when examining social processes and experiences; such are foundational to the theory of intersectionality (Carbado, Crenshaw, Mays, & Tomlinson, 2013; Crenshaw,1989). Critical race theory draws from multiple disciplines such as women and gender studies, feminism, sociology, and law, and facilities the use of multiple frameworks that allow for the examination of how race and racism structure social relations of power. Critical race theory is based on five fundamental principles – racism is systemic, and not an historical practice but rather is an everyday reality for many racialized peoples; there is a hierarchy based on color that places Whites above people of colour; race is a social construction that is dynamic, and holds little scientific validity; different racial groups experience differential racialization which are also changeable; people live multiple identity lives and the intersections of the sites results in different experiences of life; the importance of counter-narratives that privilege the voice of those who have experienced oppression (Delgado & Stefanic, 2001). CRT, by drawing from the aforementioned multiple perspectives, provides a way of evaluating, analyzing, and interrogating the experiences of those who have been marginalized and challenges dominant, uni-theoretical analytical frames. In the context of this paper, CRT provides a method for examining race-based interactions through the analysis of responses, counter-narratives to the dialogues and a different lens through which we can unearth and examine the silenced racial dialogues (Delpit, 1988) of the participants. Recognizing the extent to which race is seen as a taboo subject, while race simultaneously pervades most of our interactions in society, CRT facilitates a removal of the mask of racial neutrality while allowing for the researchers to provide a more nuanced discussion of the data and analytical themes that have emerged. One of the tenets of CRT is Whiteness as property. Dixson and Rousseau Anderson (2018), for instance, regard Whiteness as a form of property that assists in elucidating how White privilege, and its related advantages, structures the educational experiences and environments to which children are exposed in the U.S. context. It is important to note that critical race theory, including many of its foundational features, has not consistently been employed in the empirical work on children and race, or teachers’ pedagogies in the early years setting. Further to this, CRT has gained limited traction in teacher preparation as a theoretical and applied perspective to highlight the continued saliency of race as being rooted in the situated knowledges, experiences, and activism of the oppressed. In this paper, therefore, we attend to these gaps by first, acknowledging the epistemological relevance and import of CRT in relation to addressing race and racism in the early years classroom; and by second, critiquing teachers’ racesilenced practices in ways that not only dispel beliefs in “multiculturalism” and children’s “racial innocence” but also prompt educators to evaluate their perceptions surrounding race, racism and children, as well as their own professional practice. The main questions that guided this research are: 1) What are the perspectives of ECE personnel regarding race and racism in the classroom? 15 Journal of Curriculum, Teaching, Learning and Leadership in Education, Vol. 4, Iss. 2 [2019], Art. 3 https://digitalcommons.unomaha. edu/ctlle/vol4/iss2/3 2) How do they attend to racial incidences in the classrooms? 3) To what extent have they been supported in developing their facility for understanding and addressing race in ECE environments? Race and Early Childhood Education Much of the research on children and race indicates that children recognize racial differences between the ages of two and three, although new studies have shown that such awareness may emerge as early as 6 months (Boutte, Lopez-Robertson, & Powers-Costello, 2011; Cristol & Gimbert, 2008; Jordan & Hernandez-Reif, 2009; McKown & Weinstein, 2003; Perlman, Kankesan, & Zhang, 2010). However, the central indicator of the research is that the children do not start attaching value to skin color differences until they are much older and have been socialized into believing the concepts that are attached to racialized bodies. One of the most prominent implications, however, is that children can be expose