UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Black teachers may be more likely to not only recognize racism, but also engage in conversation with their students and offer more nuanced and careful approaches to anti-racist pedagogy than their white counterparts, according to new research.
Allison Sterling Henward, associate professor of early childhood and a core faculty in comparative and international education in the College of Education at Penn State, and two doctoral candidates at the University — Sung-Ryung Lyu and Quiana Jackson — published “African American Head Start Teachers’ Approaches to Police Play in the Era of Black Lives Matter” in Teachers College Record.
The research examined how teachers negotiate conflicting tensions and enact antiracist approaches within Head Start classrooms that use comprehensive and commercialized curriculums.
Henward is an educational anthropologist who looked at four different cultural communities and has been involved with the Head Start project for eight years. Since coming to Penn State in 2015, she has examined how federal policy (Head Start) meets the needs of culturally and linguistically diverse children, including how teachers negotiate conflicting tensions and enact antiracist approaches within Head Start classrooms that use comprehensive and commercialized curriculums.
“Commercialized curriculum is supposed to be meeting the needs of kids in all cultural communities,” Henward said. “But this research and my other research in American Samoa shows that when teachers are from some cultural and ethnolinguistic communities that do not always align with what’s in the curriculum, teachers have to do a whole lot of work to reframe things, whereas other teachers don’t."
Henward said her research suggests that a one-size-fits-all curriculum doesn't always work.
For the study, the research team showed a 20-minute film about a jail scene to students and teachers at four preschools, a method known as video-cued multifocal ethnography. In one of the sites — a working-class African American preschool in Washington, D.C. — the students started playing a game typically referred to by preschool teachers as “cops and robbers” after viewing the film.
Henward explained that while the 18 African American teachers she interviewed in D.C. told their students that they were playing cops and robbers, the teachers also acknowledged that it was more nuanced than that.
“We have kids who are disproportionately experiencing familiar incarceration," the teachers in Henward's study were quoted as saying. "We have kids whose neighborhoods have been ransacked by police presence. In play, children act out and take in ideas that they see.”
Those teachers, according to Henward, spoke about the play reflecting structural racism.
“That conflict is between what they are supposed to do as ECE professionals and what these teachers have to deal with as Black women in a racist society,” Henward said.
Henward praised Head Start, citing that the federal program has an unparalleled background and has had phenomenal success. “But one of the concerns, sometimes, is that the cultural communities I study don’t always have representation in what the curriculums are going to be,” Henward said.
Henward also mentioned the idea that anti-racism is either too adult or not appropriate for children. “But our research on racial socialization and our research on how parents interact with children, particularly children of color, show that parents of color have to start talking to children about racism to help them make sense of their everyday lives,” she said.
Research has shown that Black students want teachers who look like them, and Henward thinks that is important. “But we also need the white teachers and the white policymakers, and everybody who is working around this, to have a critical consciousness too, and to understand that they don’t know what they don’t know,” Henward said.