Abstract
The authors enter this conversation on equity, inclusion, and belonging in early care and education with abolition and ethnic studies as necessary standpoints that must be embodied to build what the world can and should be for its youngest inhabitants. Early care and education systems have been marked by damaging practices, pathologizing portrayals, and carceral pedagogies, which demand radical reimagining. The authors offer this writing as a collective—of early childhood educators, motherscholars, and community workers—realizing that there is more expertise and possibilities for change from the collective than any one person alone. This article shares how ethnic studies and abolition gave the authors the language and concepts to put their dreams of humanizing learning experiences for young children into action. They describe key concepts and examples of how abolition and ethnic studies can serve as methodological frameworks to attend to the survivance of young children and communities of color.
We enter this conversation on equity, inclusion, and belonging in early care and education with abolition and ethnic studies as necessary standpoints that we must embody to build what our world can and should be for our youngest inhabitants. Thinking about the global reach of white supremacy and the ongoing legacies of violence in our Black, Indigenous, South Asian, poor, undocumented, disabled, and queer/trans communities, we are exhausted and know that disruption of the current systems is desperately needed.
Early care and education systems have been marked by damaging practices, pathologizing portrayals, and carceral pedagogies, which demand radical reimagining (Beneke et al., 2022; Meiners, 2016; Souto-Manning, 2021). Given the entrenched nature of violence against non-dominant communities, we understand that a dismantling of the world is required for us to turn to the ways of knowing, living, and being of those most impacted. Vizenor (2008) calls this “survivance”—our ability not simply to survive in the face of oppression and marginalization but to find ways to survive, thrive, reimagine, and evolve. As mothers of color working in early care and education spaces, we see survivance strategies as holding the potential for transforming early care and education systems. We demand not to be spoken for, to, and of, but for our voices to be at the center as we consider transformative possibilities that acknowledge the entrenched nature of harm, as well as ways to resist and eradicate harm.
We offer this writing as a collective—of early childhood educators, motherscholars, and community workers—realizing that there is more expertise and possibilities for change from the collective than any one of us alone. Grounded in abolition and ethnic studies, we see this research as a necessary praxis, executed by engaging in research processes that enable “people to change by encouraging self-reflection and a deeper understanding of their particular situation” (Lather, 1986: 263). In this article, we connect with and extend the vision of ethnic studies and abolition to early childhood education (ECE). We do so by, first, historically framing both the ethnic studies and abolitionist teaching movement and the current state of carceral logic in early care and education systems, and then the storying (Kinloch and San Pedro, 2014) of resistance and vitalizing efforts with our communities to describe key concepts and examples of abolition and ethnic studies in early care and education. Relying on collaborative storying (Kinloch and San Pedro, 2014), whereby conversations are dialogic and reciprocal, we emphasize personal and collective experiences of the ways ethnic studies and abolitionist visions are enacted in everyday circumstances. Our stories address the article's central questions: How might the theorization of equity, inclusion, and belonging in early care and education operate through a lens of both abolition and ethnic studies? Across early care and education spaces, how can we engage the lifeworlds (e.g. voices, cultures, truths, politics) of children and communities beyond the confines of whiteness with conceptions of wholeness and humanness?
Writing as a collective
We offer this writing as a collective of mothers, first- and second-generation educators, and cultural workers who are actively engaged in the struggle to bring abolition and ethnic studies to early care, K–12 schools, and higher education settings. Schooling and our survival within an educational industrial complex that oppresses folks of color is a political act (Anderson-Zavala et al., 2017). There is a distinct difference between schooling and education. Schooling has historically centered on settler-colonial logics of violence and hegemonic norms to strip Black people, Indigenous people, and people of color of their lifeways, stories, languages, and knowledge traditions while replacing them with dominant ways of knowing and being in schools. Sabzalian (2019: xiii) refers to this schooling process as “legitimized racism,” in which schools continue to center a curriculum that refuses to center the lives, histories, and contributions of Black people, Indigenous people, and people of color. We build on the movements we are living in now as a continuation of the movements from our elders—a fight for liberation, sovereignty, water, and land rights (Medina, 2013). We recognize that oppression does not play out uniformly but rather across the multitude of intersections of social identities, and it is often disguised through division and the intentional pitting of one group against another (e.g. segregation laws preventing white people from spending time with Black people after Bacon's Rebellion and the creation of the model-minority myth to discount and discredit the real, legitimate claims of anti-Blackness and racial injustice; Anderson-Zavala et al., 2017; Pour-Khorshid, 2018; Rodriguez, 2019; Yeh et al., 2021b). We do not and cannot speak for other marginalized communities, including our own. Our hope here is to spark conversations on ECE within and beyond the school walls, centering on belonging, justice, and hope (Souto-Manning, 2021).
For all three authors, our social locations (Patel, 2016) situate our work and commitments. As children, school was challenging because we did not relate to the language, people, or stories that were centered in our schools. Cathery Yeh and Ruchi Rangnath-Agarwal arrived in the USA as young children, while Alejandra Albarran Moses was born in the USA to parents who had immigrated to North America in the 1960s. However, we were all placed in remedial groups with other students of color because we did not speak English, or it was assumed that we could not speak English, and then identified as having speech issues, and therefore could not thrive academically. Never discussed in the curriculum were stories that highlighted the resiliency of our ancestors and community members, and how they built cross-ethnic and cross-racial solidarity and alliances that would indicate to us pathways forward. Despite these similarities, our lived experiences and organizing have been across different languages and genealogies. We come from different professional backgrounds—a teacher education program coordinator (Ruchi), Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Education and Asian American Studies faculty (Cathery), and early childhood coordinator (Alejandra)—with varying epistemological frameworks in which we are each accustomed or trained to work, including cognitive psychology and critical and post-structural race theories. Our partnership represents an important and necessary effort for collective unlearning and relearning (Freire, 1998).
Ethnic studies
Ethnic studies is a political project and still an emergent movement (Sleeter and Zavala, 2020; Tintiangco-Cubales et al., 2015). We view ethnic studies as a methodological tool to advance three central goals: (1) rehumanizing educational experiences for our youth; (2) acknowledging the histories, resilience, and resistance of communities of color; and (3) shifting the use of education from awareness to action (Agarwal-Rangnath, 2020; Agarwal-Rangnath et al., 2022; Yeh et al., 2021a). Epistemically rooted in the liberation and recentering of the experiences and histories of Black and other people of color, ethnic studies honors the knowledge of our ancestors; engages in the brilliance, yearnings, and dreams of children, families, and communities of color; and interrogates the enduring tradition of white supremacist subjugation and misrepresentation, which is positioned as the normative center in early childhood curriculums and contexts (Agarwal-Rangnath, 2020; Agarwal-Rangnath et al., 2022; Sleeter and Zavala, 2020; Tintiangco-Cubales et al., 2015; Yeh et al., 2021b). Ethnic studies developed through student and community activism and struggle in high schools, colleges, and universities in the 1960s (Omatsu, 2013). However, our roots of ethnic studies are also grounded in Black intellectual resources—the writings of African American scholars like WEB Du Bois, Carter G Woodson, and Anna Julia Cooper, who called attention to the impact of racism on African American lives and consciousness (Sleeter and Zavala, 2020).
Ethnic studies has been documented to improve educational achievement, from student attendance to engagement, Grade Point Averages, and graduation rates at the high school level (Dee and Penner, 2016; De los Rios et al., 2015; Sleeter and Zavala, 2020). It is not surprising that ethnic studies courses are being developed across high schools in the USA (Sleeter and Zavala, 2020). With the positive impact of ethnic studies courses at the high school level, it is important to question why students must wait until high school to have access to ethnic studies and to consider its application within K–8 educational spaces. Its application in early childhood settings is particularly scarce, with only a few examples of it in practice (Agarwal-Rangnath, 2020).
While examples of culturally relevant pedagogy exist in early childhood settings (e.g. Allen and Steed, 2016; Chen et al., 2009; Davis et al., 2017), they often “fail to challenge colonialism or highlight forms of resistance explicitly” (Valdez, 2017: 582). Materials (e.g. textbooks) in early childhood classrooms too often misrepresent history, withhold knowledge about racial injustice, minimize or negate racial incidents, and fail to uplift stories of strength, resilience, and interracial and intersectional resistance. Decades of research have detailed the whitewashed nature of the traditional curriculum in US schools and the ways the curriculum is framed around the perspectives and experiences of white people, privileging whiteness as normalized (equating Americanness with whiteness) and normative (equating whiteness with superiority; California Alliance of Researchers for Equity in Education, 2018). Although there is substantial research that points to the value and importance of ethnic studies in K–12 classrooms (Sleeter and Zavala, 2020, Tintiangco-Cubales et al., 2015), there is little research that highlights what ethnic studies looks like in early childhood and elementary classrooms.
Valdez (2017) argues that ethnic studies is often challenging to imagine and implement in early childhood classrooms due to restrictive standards and scripted curriculums. As she explains: “educators must be empowered to divert from the textbook to build background knowledge and connect curriculum with students’ daily lives” (Valdez, 2017: 187). Ruchi's research on early childhood teachers’ implementation of ethnic studies shows that, through ethnic studies, young children can learn to question and think about the world around them to better understand their identities and the ways in which they intersect and converge with others (Agarwal-Rangnath, 2020). In Ruchi's analysis of her own experiences with her children, by reading and rereading books about skin color, coupled with conversations about how and why brown skin is beautiful, her children began to understand how their skin and/or brown skin is powerful, something to be proud of, and beautiful. This planting of seeds (Agarwal-Rangnath, 2020) through explicit stories honoring identities, community, resiliency, and solidarity provides an opportunity for us to come together collectively in ways that are centered on humanity, love, and care.
Abolition
Love (2019: 2) describes abolitionist teaching as “the practice of working in solidarity with communities of color while drawing on the imagination, creativity, refusal, (re)membering, visionary thinking, healing, rebellious spirit, boldness, determination, and subversiveness of Abolitionists to eradicate injustice in and outside of schools.” In the last few years, hate crimes in the USA have risen to the highest level, with race-based hate crimes comprising the majority reported by participating jurisdictions in 2021. Nearly half of those reported race-based hate crimes were anti-Black hate crimes, and the number of anti-Asian American Pacific Islander hate crimes was the highest on record over the past two decades (Yellow Horse et al., 2021). We worry about our elders when they are out, our children in school play yards, and walking alone ourselves. Even more troubling is to see that most demands to stop racial violence have called for an increase in policing, surveillance, and incarceration. This recent wave of racial hate crimes is not an exceptional moment in history but a continuation of a legacy of white supremacy (Benjamin, 2022).
Even in our early childhood classrooms, children are rewarded for compliance and order. Rewards are given for sitting quietly on the floor, standing in a straight line, and following rules given by a largely white, female teaching population—all of which is deeply steeped in the larger project of colonization and white supremacy (Garlen, 2019; Meiners, 2016). As Stovall argues: The practice of Abolition is more rooted in a process that is willing to end the conditions that justify marginalization. When teachers are engaged in Abolitionist pedagogy, they are teaching with the understanding that the conditions of the school (if those conditions are disrepair, lack of resources, and other toxicity) are not the fault of the students or the families that send them there. Instead, they understand the system is only doing what it is intended to do under racism/White supremacy. As soon as this point is actualized, they create a different path. A path that we dare say is fugitive, or immersed in the process of realizing that there has to be a detour from the order and compliance of the school. It is not running from something as much as it is running to a destination that is created and determined by those who are experiencing injustice. (Stovall, 2020: 4)
Abolition in early childhood classrooms
Alejandra, as the mother of a Black son, is hyperaware of the perceptions of the behavior and practices of young males in ECE programs. Before her son's birth, Alejandra read the work of Gilliam et al. (2016), which highlights the implicit bias in preschool settings, resulting in a higher rate of expulsion of Black male preschoolers. This work reinforced the fear she has about raising a Black male in the USA. Alejandra intentionally selected an ECE program that worked to address social and racial inequities. Yet, painfully, it came as no surprise when her son was called “Mr Disagreeable” by his white early childhood educators once he started preschool as one of only two Black students in his class. With his deep voice, high volume, and deep emotional sensitivity, paired with his incredible intelligence and high vocabulary, he was often misunderstood by his white educators. At the age of two, he was already identified as a problem student.
It was not until the school hired a Black male educator, who saw himself in her son, that things changed. On graduating from preschool, Alejandra wrote the following to the Black educator: As a parent, there were moments in which I was nervous as to how he would do in school, yes, even preschool. He has a strong, passionate personality that could easily put some people off. But you, you have always valued who he is, what he brings to the table, and elevated absolutely every one of his strengths.
The term “abolition” is an intentional reminder that what we face is not a broken system; it is a system that is designed to get the results produced (Davis, 2010; Stovall, 2018). ECE has been used as a weapon to legitimize capitalist interests, (re)producing systems of ranking and sorting young children through carceral logic, thereby positioning children and families of color at the bottom of the social strata (Souto-Manning, 2021). As Ladson-Billings (2017: 5) reminds us, “school is often a place of trauma” for many Black and Indigenous people, and other people of color.
Souto-Manning and Rabadi-Raol (2018: 204) remind us that “traditional notions of quality in early childhood education are exclusionary, rooted in White monolingual and monocultural values and experiences, and simply deficit paradigms to frame the developmental trajectories of multiple minoritized children.” Honoring children's identities is often limited to pictures of children in “ethnic” clothes, multiracial skin-color crayons, and cultural holiday celebrations (Agarwal-Rangnath, 2020). These surface-level, feel-good multiculturalist approaches will not support our children to question why some cultures, languages, and ways of being are centered in the curriculum and classroom walls, social media, policies, and decisions, while those who are not white are still heavily surveilled, hyper-labeled, or hyper-punished (e.g. Agarwal-Rangnath et al., 2022; Annamma et al., 2013; Souto-Manning and Rabadi-Raol, 2018; Yeh, in press; Yeh, in press). In too many ECE spaces, children whose learning practices align with norms of whiteness are constructed as “good,” while children of color, particularly those who are multiply marginalized, are pathologized, labeled, and punished (Beneke et al., 2022).
Beneke et al. (2022) highlight how early childhood classrooms are also entangled in the carceral logics of surveillance, compliance, and punishment, in which the practices of policing children's bodies, minds, and behaviors, particularly those of children of color, are expected and normalized. The daily practices, policies, and interactions in ECE settings often govern the carceral logics that position some children as valuable and others as deviant, enacting harm on children along the lines of race, language, disability, and immigration status (Beneke et al., 2022). Carceral logics and pedagogy are especially prevalent in schools serving students of color. Accountability regimes target communities of color, who do not and cannot align with prescriptive white norms, and are then held captive within a school-to-prison nexus of suspension, expulsion, and special education classification (Annamma et al., 2013; Winn, 2018; Yeh, in press). Childhood school-based practices that mirror policing and prisons, with low expectations, underachievement, and the need for highly controlled spaces and zero-tolerance policies, have perpetuated. Opportunity disparities, the number and frequency of suspensions and expulsions, and placements in self-contained special education or remedial settings, and lower tracked settings disproportionately target Black boys and Latinos (Annamma, 2018; Calabrese Barton and Tan, 2020; Laura, 2014).
Learning from and leaning on the work of critical scholars in ECE (e.g. Agarwal-Rangnath, 2020; Beneke et al., 2022; Souto-Manning, 2021), and abolition teaching networks, liberation networks, and critical resistance, our hope is to pursue ways of designing childhood learning settings for collective liberation in order to delegitimize the carceral logic and consider ways to transform teaching and learning that build from community organizing. Centering abolition with ethnic studies, our political vision is to eliminate dehumanizing practices, surveillance, and the control of our children's bodies and minds to create sustainable and flourishing spaces that honor the humanity of young children and their families.
Dialogue: ethnic studies, abolition, and our humanity
The growing movement to bring ethnic studies into K–12 schools raises important questions for ECE. What does ethnic studies mean in ECE and how should it be taught? Is ethnic studies curricular? Can ethnic studies take place only in the classroom? What are the limitations of ethnic studies? How can abolition extend the work of ethnic studies forward beyond the classroom and as a community? These are the kinds of questions that brought our group together.
The framework discussed in this article is organized around a holistic ethnic studies framework that was initially proposed by Ruchi (Agarwal-Rangnath, 2020). We have engaged in collaborative meetings, focusing on our work as motherscholars of color and cultural workers serving in ECE settings to unpack the framework, and specifically thinking of how the pandemic and racial reckoning have affected ECE settings and our communities, and how we can move forward. Benjamin (2022: 24) states: “Racism, I have long contended, is not born out of ‘ignorance,’ or not knowing. Rather, it's a distorted form of knowledge: a way of seeing and thus being in the world.” Our coming-together arose from a shared hope to reclaim power over and understand how our thoughts, habits, and actions are shaped and shape the larger environment. The process of naming and unpacking the framework developed through multiple sessions of dialogue, storytelling, and shared reflection over the last year to work toward justice-oriented approaches to ECE research, policy, and practice. The framework extended beyond classroom settings through Alejandra and her role working to build partnerships with families and justice-involved community leaders to extend social services as an early childhood coordinator in one of the largest urban cities in the country, as well as Cathery's and Ruchi's growing efforts to organize for and sustain ethnic studies at the local, state, and national levels. Our project and dialogue together evolved to focus on these central questions: How might the theorization of equity, inclusion, and belonging in early care and education operate through a lens of both abolition and ethnic studies? Across early care and educational spaces, how can we engage the lifeworlds (e.g. voices, cultures, truths, politics) of children and communities beyond the confines of whiteness with conceptions of wholeness and humanness?
Who we are greatly influences what we have created (Patel, 2016)—how our own positionalities intersect to inform and shape our emergent vision of abolition and ethnic studies in ECE communities. Rather than seeing these identities purely as problems, we use them here as a resource for articulating, envisioning, and dreaming of what is possible within and across the movement for ethnic studies and abolition in ECE. Modeling our own process of conceptualizing and unpacking ethnic studies together through storytelling, we continue the traditions of our ancestral heritage by storytelling here.
Following Kinloch and San Pedro’s (2014) methodological framing of storying, we engage in storying as we co-create—or co-author here—narratives about ethnic studies and abolition in ECE communities. While the stories presented are from individual projects and experiences in ECE communities, they are simultaneously interconnected in ways that lead to questions about expansive forms of engagement, ethics, and trust in ECE settings. Storying occurs in nonlinear ways with “deliberate moves between ‘traditional’ academic writing and ‘reflective’ vignette writing” (Kinloch and San Pedro, 2014: 22). With this attempt, we draw on stories and lessons learned from our work in classrooms and communities to model the ways of listening, learning, and building from one another from dialogue. We interweave storytelling, narrated dialogue, and autobiographical reflection to model the connections between story, methodology, and ethnic studies as an embodied practice. What follows is our shared storytelling—a living manuscript (Shor and Freire, 1987) of knowledge construction.
Theme 1. Identity and narrative
Picking up my son (age four) from school one day, he says to me: “Mommy, your skin is not beautiful. Only mine and [my sister’s, age three] is beautiful. Ours glows in the sun, Yours doesn’t.” As a South Asian-American motherscholar and someone who has struggled with racial identity, I was deeply worried about what my son had internalized, who had planted this seed for him, and the ways in which my son was conceptualizing and learning about race and racial identity. In our family, everyone is brown. My children’s and their father's skin is slightly lighter than mine. Even as I am intentional about what my children read (i.e. predominantly books with children of color), my son is still internalizing messages from shows, school, and the playground. He is seen perceiving brown—specifically dark brown—as not beautiful. Already, at the young age of four, my son understands the relative worth of light and dark skin (Tatum, 1997). I could see his racial identity forming and taking shape through multiple actions with those similar and different from himself. My daughter, who is very often influenced by her brother, also began commenting on skin color. Shortly after the exchange with my son, she said to me: “Brown skin is ugly.” I replied: “But your skin is brown. Are you ugly? Is mommy ugly?” She said: “No, we are beautiful.” Even though my daughter is in a home with parents who look like her and tell her that she is beautiful, strong, smart, and powerful, she is learning that brown skin is different from white skin and offers different privileges. (Ruchi)
The curriculum and mainstream culture act as colonizers (Picower and Kohli, 2017). The work of abolitionist imaginaries reminds us to question why some cultures, language, and ways of being are addressed within the classroom walls and curriculum while others are frequently ignored and punished. Racialized threats take many forms, from the physical and psychocultural assaults we are experiencing right now to the Eurocentricity of the school curriculum (Hsieh et al., 2022; Souto-Manning, 2021; Yeh et al., 2021b). This process of teaching and learning about race, especially to debunk dominant messages about our identities and what it means to be American, requires critically guided racialization.
We use a case example of Vilma, a transitional kindergarten teacher, in Oakland, California, to highlight how stories and narratives can serve as rich units for racial analyses in ECE settings. In this activity, Vilma leads children in an exploration of family, with the intention to break down the dominant narrative of the nuclear family perpetuated in picture books, magazines, and media texts (see Agarwal-Rangnath, 2020). To begin, Vilma reads different books on families in her classroom library, most of which perpetuate a narrow narrative around families. As she reads to her children, she and the children compare the different family structures reflected in the picture books to the different family structures in the classroom, noting if they are a family with a mom and a dad, a family with adopted children, or a same-sex family, among other family structures identified. This activity helps the children to notice how family can be defined in many ways, each one unique. She finds it important for the young learners to define for themselves who is in their family. Their descriptions may include their grandparents, a pet, a church member, or their neighbor. To support her students to analyze text critically and to identify the wide spectrum of family structures possible, she asks the following questions during the read-alouds: How are these families similar to yours? How are they different? How is this family special? What kind of families does this book teach us about?
Following an analysis of the classroom library, Ms Serrano invited students’ parents to come and share their family traditions with the class (e.g. food, a story, pictures, a dance). The first family, a family of biological Ohlone siblings who were being fostered by a same-sex, mixed-race partnership, did not look like the families commonly seen in picture books. Renee (pseudonym), the transitional kindergarten student, and her two brothers participated in Ohlone ceremonies and showed the class a dance that they had learned for a ceremony. Renee's family history around being Indigenous sparked a conversation around immigration and enabled the students to understand that while many of their families had immigrant roots from different parts of the world, the classroom also consisted of families who had been in the USA the whole time. The family unit, which focused on family traditions and critiquing heterogenous notions of families, led the way to a unit on immigration, colonialism, and indigeneity.
Vilma's case highlights how stories can serve as rich units for racial analyses, modeling the type of continual work needed on ourselves and with children to examine our own biases, assumptions, and values, and move toward honoring wholeness. Vilma avoids common multicultural approaches to identity that only include communities of color and marginalized groups through disjointed, superficial lessons focused on food, fun, and festivals. Students engage in discussion of identity through an exploration of self, which allows the young learners to define for themselves who is in their family. Vilma and her students also analyze how certain identities are expressed more in certain spaces than other identities by comparing the different family structures reflected in the picture books to the different family structures in the classroom. Understanding that certain identities are stereotypes and (mis)represented, she engages the students with examples of stereotypes that are reinforced in various aspects of society (e.g. education, media, the law, immigration) and how essentialist ways of attending to identities have impacted the ways communities of color have been discriminated in the USA. It is noteworthy how Vilma centers on the stories of Renee and her family history to attend to historicity and identities as situated across immigration, imperialism, and migration, and to the impact of imperialism.
Theme 2. Understanding systems and power
When I began 20 years ago in the field of early childhood education, all my colleagues were white women. This pattern has continued. It was honestly hard to see myself as a leader or accept when others called me one. No one reflected my identity as a Latinx mother raising two beautiful Afro-Latino children, which is why I knew moving into leadership positions is so critical. I am currently the early childhood coordinator for one of the most ethnically diverse major cities in the country, and was recently tasked to serve as lead on a county program committee to create a city plan for early childhood programs. In one of the most diverse communities in the country, the majority on the program committee were largely white women. While the group goal was to address systemic inequities in early care programs through a racial equity approach, few could articulate how. We can’t treat equity as a product; it needs to be a collaborative process of co-design with those most impacted. So, in developing our city plans for early childhood programs, we brought in representatives from all city districts, gathered input from parents of children that currently have less access to quality care and development supports (e.g. with special needs, undocumented immigration status, adoptees), and, for the first time ever, even input from preschool-aged children. This process of tapping into the perspective of community members and broadening access to decision-making has become the model for how our city engages the community for subsequent city plans. (Alejandra)
White women, in these administrative roles, hold the power to determine the program structure, the curriculum used, and schedules of work. They create the systems of care at their ECE facilities with little to no say from the children and families being served and the women of color who are providing direct service. Women of color are more likely to racially and economically represent the communities they serve. This allows for the same system of power and privilege to continue to replicate itself within the field of ECE.
Alejandra's story reminds us that the work of justice requires us to consider whose voices are heard. Who is silenced? Communities of color and those who are multiply marginalized should be at the center of decision-making. ECE systems are complex and tension-filled (Garlen, 2019; Gillborn, 2005; Ladson-Billings, 2014; Yeh and Otis, 2019). Non-dominant families and communities have ways of knowing, doing, and being to navigate through the dynamics of power, racism, and hierarchies (Vizenor, 2008). Recognizing the resilience, ingenuity, and agency we have had all along is part of the process of addressing systemic racism and shifting power. We share Alejandra's story to remind us that the journey toward justice must begin with non-dominant community experiences and narratives. Who are ECE programs responsive to if decisions are not made with and by those who are impacted most directly?
Violence is much more than individual acts of hate and is entrenched in our communities’ lack of affordable housing and the gentrification of our neighborhoods, the lack of access to health care and childcare, and our country's long and ongoing history of denied access (Benjamin, 2022).
Valdez (2017: 592) reminds us that “decolonization is not a destination, but rather a process that educators must continue to engage in order to resist becoming complacent in perpetuating colonial ideology.” It is with each other and with others in ECE communities that we have the capacity to name out systems of whiteness in ECE policies, processes, and practices, and then be able to connect to pedagogy, personal healing, and community action. Below, we share another story from Alejandra to highlight how we have found reclaiming our histories and spaces of belonging that have been largely forgotten, misrepresented, or left absent as essential in challenging systems of power: The ECE symposium is our city's largest conference. Professional development hours are required for ECE educators in the state. While the symposium provides professional development at a cost significantly lower than most other ECE professional learning opportunities, the $100 price tag is still out of reach for many professionals in the field, who, on average, make $15 an hour. The ECE workforce system was designed to create intentional barriers that prevent people of color from obtaining the opportunities, compensation, and dignity they deserve for their work. To know requires us to speak out. I brought attention to the inequities to access created through this price and brought the idea of providing scholarships for those who could not afford the conference cost, specifically for home-based childcare providers and child development students. This funding was approved, and 36 ECE professionals and students were able to attend the symposium for the first time. And it did not stop there. This year, for the first time, nearly one-third of the conference sessions will be available in Spanish. In a city where many of the ECE workforce are Latinx and fluent in Spanish, a language that is also my own, I realize how profound it is for the symposium attendees to see and hear Spanish-speaking presenters sharing their expertise. It's been hard to acknowledge, but this process of individual reflection and collective sharing with my other two mamas and sister-friends here has allowed me to name out how I hold power in the field of ECE in my city and the surrounding areas. This power has brought about opportunities for systems change, language access at the largest professional development opportunity in our city, and increased opportunity to attend professional learning and community-building for those prior opportunities that have been out of reach. And, in time, with increased changes, ECE providers of color may have greater access and confidence to apply for leadership positions that they may not have previously imagined. My place in a leadership role matters in changing policies, practices, and access in a system designed against us. (Alejandra)
This process of collaborative storying (Kinloch and San Pedro, 2014) of the ways ethnic studies and an abolitionist vision are enacted in our everyday circumstances has allowed us to name out how equity, belonging, and power can operate beyond the confines of whiteness. We found that engaging in the lifeworlds (e.g. voices, cultures, truths, politics) of children and communities requires us to identify and honor our own agency.
Theme 3. Building community and solidarity
My first few years of teaching was in bilingual settings in the Los Angeles urban core. My students were immigrants like me; most had moved from countries in Central America or China. I made visits to every student's home, over 300 in my 10 years of teaching, with hopes that our stories and histories provided the foundation in which our curriculum stood. I began teaching when California voted for the passage of Proposition 187—also known as the Save Our State referendum. Driven by xenophobia, proponents of Proposition 187 blamed undocumented families as political scapegoats for the economic depression, unemployment, government failure, crime, violence, disease. The bill restricted children and families from access to the state's public services, including access to public education and health care. The measure contained a “suspicion clause,” which directed public workers, teachers, and health-care professionals to report “suspected” undocumented immigrants. However, it never defined the basis for such suspicions. How will one differentiate? Is it the way you speak? The sound of your last name? The way you dress? The shade of your skin? At that time, I didn’t have the words or language to describe the myriad ways race, racism, and white supremacy latch onto false narratives of unity, aka [also known as] Save Our State, to advance anti-racism, ultranationalism, and xenophobia. These false rhetorics of patriotism and national unity are used to justify the pitting of communities against each other and the vying for belonging and acceptance of who would be considered “American” enough. (Cathery)
Within the education community, how often do we speak boldly for justice but continue to inflict racial violence and division? Decades of equity-based ECE reforms have focused on access and inclusion with minimal attention to the racial contract (Mills, 2014). Thus, these initiatives have only perpetuated existing racial, gendered, linguistic, and ableist hierarchies (Souto-Manning and Rabadi-Raol, 2018). The normative centering of whiteness, standardized testing and readiness measures, and the ECE curriculum as only textbooks, within the confines of published textbooks and classroom walls, serve as tools of exclusion and social stratification to benefit some while marginalizing others (Beneke et al., 2022; Yeh and Otis, 2019). Cathery's story as a beginning teacher reminds us that the political struggle for justice and community takes place within and outside of classrooms.
At this moment, particularly within early care and childhood education, we see attacks on teacher and student identities and agency, book bans, anti-critical race theory and anti-LGBTQIA (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, agender) legislation, and a mass exodus of educators (Pendharkar, 2022). These violent attacks and regressive policies go hand in hand with the destructive ideologies of white supremacy that have time and again evoked the pedagogy of fear to force silence and compliance (Hsieh et al., 2022; Meiners and Tolliver, 2016; Omatsu, 2013; Pour-Khorshid, 2018). The crisis is systemic. It is COVID-19 as a pandemic, the persistence of white nationalism, police brutality, and anti-human discourses, practices, and legislation that are at the center of so much of what is wrong with our country and its history.
Ethnic studies and abolition remind us that we can be concerned about racism and white supremacy but not center whiteness and white ideologies through solidarity (Omatsu, 2013; Rodriguez, 2019; Stovall, 2018). Movements of solidarity between communities are widespread and out in the open today. We share another story from Cathery as an example.
In November 2018, Cathery’s city council voted to exempt itself from a state law to make schools, hospitals, and places of worship no longer legal sanctuaries (areas off limits to immigration arrest) for undocumented residents. The ordinance that was passed was proposed by an organization identified by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a white supremacist hate group. In response, several families in the community, including Cathery's, formed a community-based organization that worked with the American Civil Liberties Union to sue the city and demand repeal of the passed anti-immigration ordinance.
Around that time, the principal of a local elementary school that served many Black families and other families of color posted on social media, in reponse to Colin Kaepernick and his kneeling protest against policy brutality, calling Kaepernick an “anti-American thug.” Outraged by this anti-Black, anti-community posting, the community group began to organize a petition against the school board for more books representing the community; diversity, equity, and inclusion training for educators; hiring of educators of color in leadership positions; and ethnic studies. Amassing thousands of signatures and working with press, hundreds of community members spoke or wrote to the school board about the violence that they and their children had experienced. The community group requested a task force to bring students, community members, and district educators together as critical decision-makers to district reform, with subgroups on hiring and disciplinary practices, the curriculum, and parent education. In the spring of 2021, the school board also approved ethnic studies.
While the broader society establishes the rules and regulations that constrain or allow teacher and student agency, there is also space for community agency and resistance. If we take a holistic look at US history, there is a long history of solidarity across racial groups, and those relationships are needed now more than ever. Without these interracial relations and solidarity movements, and if communities of color are divided among each other instead of addressing the overall problem of systemic racism and white supremacy head-on, those in power and with privilege will continue to benefit.
Theme 4. Transformation and change
More than 17 million public school students are enrolled in 900 districts across the USA. They are restricted by local and state laws and policies targeting teacher and student agency to teach concepts of race, racism, and gender—often termed “critical race theory” within the curriculum (Pendharkar, 2022). Administrators have reported, suspended, and even terminated educators for teaching about race. Over 20 states have banned critical race theory from being taught in the nation's public school classrooms. A new report from the Institute for Democracy, Education, and Access found that 35% of all students in US K–12 schools have been impacted somehow by local anti-critical-race-theory efforts (Pollock and Rogers, 2022). These attacks on public education highlight the systemic nature in which white supremacy culture is maintained, and the need to collectively build toward abolition in and outside of the classroom.
Abolition requires collective resistance against policies and practices that (re)produce inequities on ever-increasing and widening scales (Love, 2019). Ruchi is the executive director of a statewide collaborative of educational researchers that aims to speak collectively, publicly, and in solidarity with organizations and communities to dismantle gatekeeping policies. The alliance meets with state leaders and policymakers, as well as the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing. With over 600 members, the California Alliance of Researchers for Equity in Education (CARE-ED) provides a platform for its members to speak as educational researchers in an effort to reframe the debate on education and provide a support system that partners with other community and educational organizations working toward equity and justice.
The dominant frames and discourses in education, including ECE settings, often only attend to equity as window dressing (Patel, 2017), addressing neither community needs nor development (Souto-Manning and Rabadi-Raol, 2018; Stovall, 2018). While preaching cultural responsiveness, teacher education often (re)produces policies and practices that emphasize organizational control and accountability, hyper-standardization, and factory-like systems (Shabati et al., 2022). As Shabati et al. (2022: 196) remind us: “Abolition is not just a critique of systems, policies, and practices that are outside of us but also the way in which we enact carceral logics in our teaching, our relationships with preservice teachers, our colleagues and our lives.” As teacher educators, we cannot position ourselves outside of the process; we need to do the work too (Shabati et al., 2022; Tintiangco-Cubales, et al., 2015). Collective action matters. For Ruchi, her focus has been on building power with other critical grass-roots organizations outside of academia. It is through distributed collective action that new forms of learning, new identity pathways, and the transformation of community values and ethics can take place.
Discussion and conclusion
The abolitionist scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore (Kumanyika, 2020) says: “Abolition seeks to undo the way of thinking and doing things that sees prison and punishment as solutions for all kinds of social, economic, political, behavioral and interpersonal problems.” Black liberation organizers have long called for sweeping budget cuts to anti-Black policing and the criminal legal system, and reinvestment in social services, education, and childcare. Too few families are eligible to receive childcare assistance, and childcare remains largely privatized (and available only for the rich). Creating alternatives to prison and policing requires ECE systems that prioritize affordable and accessible childcare, and a community-directed reimagining of holistic community safety and well-being, as examples of resources, capacity, and power that allow our communities to flourish. An abolitionist paradigm reminds us to divest ourselves of oppressive institutions to ensure a community-driven process of public investment in early care education, the families we serve and early care educators, who have long been paid poverty-level wages.
As motherscholars and educators of color, this article represents our hopes and dreams of building on and engaging in the work of honoring the future inhabitants of our world from a humanizing and abolitionist perspective. Liberation in ECE is a complex endeavor. In an education system that is designed to meet white community needs and interests and maintain the white power structure (Meiners, 2016; Souto-Manning, 2021), liberation for ourselves and others cannot be achieved through the current structure. We must spend a significant amount of our own learning and teaching time unlearning, unteaching, and relearning from outside the field of ECE and academia. There is much we can learn with and from the collective action of the social movements taking place in our schools, streets, and communities (Boggs, 2012; Medina, 2013).
We cannot continue to work in silos. We need to take the learning that happens through collective dialogue and action seriously and bring (analytical, design-based, and on-the-ground) resources in relationship with each other, and to school and state board meetings, so that the potential consequentiality of our work can be mobilized for change. Being critical is “less about a declaration than a disposition through scholarship. This process is both reflexive and recursive” (Ladson-Billings, 2017: 81). It is through collective and critical reflection with community organizers, ethnic studies teachers, and early childhood researchers, which this article embodies, that we are able to interrogate the deep and systemic nature of white supremacy and the role that early childhood educators play in perpetuating or disrupting injustices. As Pour-Khorshid argues: In order to prevent the cyclical nature of social toxicity perpetuated within and outside of schools, all educators—spanning all levels of experience and politicization—must tend to unhealed trauma caused by White supremacy, patriarchy, and other forms of oppression. (Pour-Khorshid, 2018:326)
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
