What Is Anti-Bias Education?
Anti-bias education (ABE) is an optimistic commitment to supporting children who live in a highly diverse and yet still inequitable world. Rather than a formula for a particular curriculum, it is an underpinning perspective and framework that permeates everything in early childhood education—including your interactions with children, families, and colleagues. ABE is based on the understanding that children are individuals with their own personalities and temperaments and with social group identities based on the families who birth and raise them and the way society views who they are. These identities are both externally applied by the world around them and internally constructed within the child.
ABE has four goals for children that have developed from the need to identify and prevent, as much as possible, the harmful emotional and psychological impacts on children from societal prejudice and bias. The goals are designed to strengthen children’s sense of self and family (identity, Goal 1); to support their joy in human diversity (diversity, Goal 2); to enable them to gain the cognitive and social and emotional tools to recognize hurtful behavior (justice, Goal 3); and to develop the confidence and skills to work with others to build inclusive, fairer ways of being in a community (activism, Goal 4). The four core goals of ABE are described in detail.
At the heart of anti-bias work is a vision of a world in which all children are able to blossom and each child’s abilities and gifts are able to flourish:
The Four Core Goals of Anti-Bias Education
Goal 1, Identity
• Teachers will nurture each child’s construction of knowledgeable and confident personal and social identities.
• Children will demonstrate self-awareness, confidence, family pride, and positive social identities.
Goal 2, Diversity
• Teachers will promote each child’s comfortable, empathic interaction with people from diverse backgrounds.
• Children will express comfort and joy with human diversity, use accurate language for human differences, and form deep, caring connections across all dimensions of human diversity.
Goal 3, Justice
• Teachers will foster each child’s capacity to critically identify bias and will nurture each child’s empathy for the hurt bias causes.
• Children will increasingly recognize unfairness (injustice), have language to describe unfairness, and understand that unfairness hurts.
Goal 4, Activism
• Teachers will cultivate each child’s ability and confidence to stand up for oneself and for others in the face of bias.
• Children will demonstrate a sense of empowerment and the skills to act, with others or alone, against prejudice and/or discriminatory actions.
• All children and families have a sense of belonging and experience affirmation of their personal and social identities and their cultural ways of being.
• All children have access to and participate in the education they need to become successful, contributing members of society.
• All children are engaged in joyful learning that supports their cognitive, physical, creative, and social development.
• Children and adults know how to respectfully and easily live, learn, and work together in diverse and inclusive environments. All families have the resources they need to fully nurture their children.
• All children and families live in safe, peaceful, healthy, comfortable housing and neighborhoods.
This vision of ABE also reflects the basic human rights described in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UN OHCHR 1989):
• The right to survival
• The right to develop to the fullest
• The right to protection from harmful influences, abuse, and/or exploitation
• The right to participate fully in family, cultural, and social life
In order for children to receive these rights, their society, their families, and those responsible for their care and education must work together to provide what each child needs to flourish. A worldwide community of anti-bias educators shares this vision. They adapt its goals and principles to their particular settings as they work with children and their families to bring these rights into being.