An Anti-bias Work Team at PTCC

This year Peabody Terrace Children's center has an Anti-bias Education Work Team. It is composed of veteran PTCC teachers eager to spend the year learning skills and content necessary to create emergent anti-bias curriculum with children, colleagues and families in this way. Our work team is shaped by the participants, but the administrators and I created some structure to define it.

Our learning goals.

Every member will be able to:

• Assess and increase our understanding of our own racial identity, biases, privileges and areas of growth.
• Recognize bias in the systems in which we play a part
• Work together to support systemic change; here at PTCC and elsewhere.
• Appropriately talk to adults and children about what we know.

The administrative team has charged this work team to:

• Create a strong, shared definition for “anti-bias education”
• Pursue internal and external research to answer a question relevant to our work
• Assess our center’s anti-bias practice
• Develop shared goals/plan for institutional change
• Create examples of in-depth, pro-active, multi-disciplinary, anti-bias education at PTCC

The anti-bias work team is made up of teachers who...

Have worked here for at least a year. To honor the special work of teachers in their first year at a new school we are only opening this learning opportunity to more veteran teachers.

Want to read, watch, listen and learn on our own time. We expect teachers to put our professional development hours toward this effort because it requires significant learning.

Are ready to try new anti-bias teaching strategies and practices in their classroom. Like our students, we learn by doing.We support one another as we take risks together.

Can share our learning with the community. "Each one teach one." is an African American proverb that comes to us from enslaved African people who taught one another literacy and other skills and practices to resist and escape enslavement. These words may have been brought to this continent by their captured ancestors who held knowledge as a liberatory gift that comes with an obligation to share with others. This sustaining belief and effective strategy supported civil rights organizers and others working for justice. In this tradition, we will share our learning with our community; through conversations, team meetings, documentation, and a culminating presentation.

Structure:

We meet once a month to learn and reflect. We've decided to use John Nimmo and Debbie LeeKeenan's Strategic Planning process from their book Leading Anti-bias Early Childhood Programs; A Guide for Change.