Antibias Curriculum
Further support for these perspectives comes from the antibias curriculum guidelines developed by Louise Derman-Sparks and Julie Olsen Edwards (2010). The premise of antibias curriculum is that a central focus of our work should be “to support children’s full development in our multiracial, multilingual, multicultural world and to give them the tools to stand up to prejudice, stereotyping, bias, and eventually to institutional ‘isms'”(p. vii).
The four broad goals of antibias curriculum can inform our work with families as curriculum resources:
“Each child will:
- Demonstrate self-awareness, confidence, family pride, and positive social identities.
- Express comfort and joy with human diversity, accurate language for human differences, and deep, caring human connectedness.
- Increasingly recognize unfairness, have language to describe unfairness, and understand that unfairness hurts.
- Demonstrate empowerment and the skills to act, with others or alone, against prejudice and/or discriminatory actions.” (pp. 45)
While there are many dimensions of the curriculum that can be enhanced with family support, learning about the families of the young children you teach is certainly one way to individualize curriculum and promote the goals outlined above.