It’s Time to Talk Racism Day 11: Intro to Anti-Biased Education

When Chrissy from Buzzing with Ms. B. reached out to me to participate in this campaign against racism after the shooting in her hometown of El Paso happened, I knew I had to say yes. Here is someone who wasn't content with just feeling sad, angry or hurt about what happened. Here is someone who is taking action. My friend Megan from Too Cool for Middle School posted last week about the Teaching Tolerance Social Justice Standards and how she uses them to guide her in purposeful lessons about race, identity, anti-racism, and other topics. Head over to her post here to download a great resource for your classroom. I wanted to expand a little bit on how to do that using these standards and the Teaching Tolerance Website. Let me honest these topics can be overwhelming for adults to talk about much less teach to children about. This resource has helped guide me into feeling more confident when teaching these topics to my kindergarteners. Yes, I said kindergarteners!
The great thing about Teaching Tolerance is that all of their resources on their website are completely free. You can make a free account and bookmark all of these things to your account so that they are easy for your to find. The great thing is that you can search for resources, lesson plans, and even film kits that are completely free to you.

Here's how I use the Social Justice Standards in my classroom. The Social Justice Standards are made up of four domains: Identity, Diversity, Justice and Action. Each domain has 5 anchor standards and then 5 grade level outcomes. The domains and anchor standards are the same for all grade levels, but the grade level outcomes guide you how to do that in a way that is age appropriate. I have four grading periods in the school year so each grading period I focus on one of the four domains. Since I have kindergarten students, I feel identity is the best to start with. You can't learn how to appreciate other people who are different than you, if you don't know yourself first. Teaching Tolerance makes it easy because I can easily search for lessons that fall under that domain. Just hover the Classroom Resources heading at the top of the website and then click on Lessons. After scrolling down, you can click on the Filter Lessons drop down menu and begin searching. It's really that easy! I pick the domain and grade level I need and a whole list of lessons comes up.

Since my students are so young, I think it's really important to delve deep into identity. I focus on it the first nine weeks, but we really try to continue it all year long. Since my students are bilingual students, most of my students aren't reflected in the typical literature and curriculum that we have here in Texas. It means that I have to plan extra to include more of this, but a mistake I was making was that I was spending so much time representing Mexican and Mexican American voices. I decided that including more info from my families was important so that I knew all the countries representing my students and their families. I used resources from Naomi O'Brien and LaNesha Tabb to send home. I learned that I had families who came from Colombia, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, and Puerto Rico. By focusing on Mexico only, I was excluding so many voices. It's really a simple thing you can implement: talk to your students and their families.

I also want to make sure to celebrate voices of other races and ethnicities. When you think of the Latinx community, so many picture Brown Spanish speaking people. The reality is, Latinx is an ethnicity not a race. We have Black, Indigenous and White people in the community too. Aside from using the Lesson feature on the Teaching Tolerance website, I do this with books. One of the books I really enjoy is The Name Jar by Yangsook Choi. It's a beautiful story about how honoring everyone's name is important. For many of us who are children of immigrants, we feel forced to change our names to fit into the English language. Sometimes that's by using nicknames like I did when I was young going by Cristy instead of Cristina. It took a long time for me to be proud of my name, with the Spanish spelling and the way it rolls of the tongue in the Spanish my family uses. Imagine how our students could feel knowing you're trying your best to use the name their families chose for them?

I hope that you are able to use some of these and all the ideas given so far in your classroom in some way. This post is in honor of Arturo Benavidez. This post is part of a series against racism, please click here to read the other posts from this series.