What kind of people do we want to see in this world?

Anti-Bias Education, Identity Development, & Community Building

It is an ongoing priority to reflect on and be intentional about messages our children receive about race, gender, class, sexual orientation, age, ability and social justice in our environment & school community. We strive for our materials and curriculum to represent human diversity and celebrate difference.

Anti-Bias Education:

Our curriculum and materials actively take into account the Anti-Bias Education (ABE) Framework established by the National Association of the Education of Young Children (NAEYC). We plan to integrate the following goals of ABE into our curriculum in developmentally appropriate manner for the infants & toddlers we serve: 

Goal #1: Identity Children will demonstrate self-awareness, confidence, family pride, and positive social identities.

Goal #2: Diversity Children will express comfort and joy with human diversity, use accurate language for human differences, and form deep and caring connections across all dimensions of human diversity.

Goal #3: Justice Children will increasingly recognize unfairness (injustice), have language to describe unfairness, and understand that unfairness hurts.

Goal #4: Activism Children will demonstrate a sense of empowerment and the skills to act, with others or alone, against prejudice and/or discriminatory actions.

Identity & Community:

In their first year of life, infants are asking the important questions “Who am I?” “Who are you?” and “Who are we together?”. As they navigate every environment, social interaction & relationship they learn about who they are… an individual person, as they relate to others, and as part of their larger community. We’ve watched this process with wonder in all of our classrooms over the years and it has become central to our practice to support this learning in the children we serve. We encourage self-expression and child led play, model respect & authenticity in relationships, support interactions between children, and curate child-facing documentation to infuse positive identity learning and community building into our curriculum.