Anti-Bias Education is a framework for supporting children's social development, which:

• Puts diversity and equity goals at the center of all aspects of an organization's daily life

• Creates a community that values all dimensions of human difference, and

• Provides educators and children with tools to identify and respond to bias

Anti-Bias Education requires that we carry a consistent awareness of the social context of our classroom and our world, and the ongoing disposition to bring that awareness to everything we do as educators. So, no big deal… Fortunately, Anti-Bias Education has been well-researched and thoughtfully structured, and there are 4 core goals of Anti-Bias Education, detailed in the book Anti-Bias Education for Young Children and Ourselves:

• Identity: Demonstrate self-awareness, confidence, family pride, and positive social identities.

• Diversity: Express comfort and joy with human diversity; accurate language for human differences; and deep, caring human connections.

• Justice: Recognize unfairness, have language to describe unfairness, and understand that unfairness hurts.

• Action: Demonstrate empowerment and the skills to act, with others or alone, against prejudice and/or discrimination.

As you can imagine, the Anti-Bias goals are ongoing - they don't happen in order, and they're not a checklist that's complete once a child has accomplished them. They're intentions that can be woven into the curriculum in all parts of our classrooms, and all times of the day. Which sounds like a tall order…but it's really not a big new thing. We can think about how these goals connect to the things we're already doing in our classrooms and schools: Anti-Bias Education supports our ongoing goals for children's social-emotional learning, and nests perfectly with our commitment to responsive curriculum planning.

The practice of Anti-Bias Education follows a very similar pathway to the cycle of observation, reflection, and planning that drives Responsive Curriculum. Here’s a simple diagram to consider - based on my conversations with Emily Viehauser and Trudy Mossop - illustrating a possible way to envision putting Anti-Bias Education into action. In this conception, our opportunities for promoting and practicing Anti-Bias Education fall somewhere on a spectrum from reactive to proactive, and from short-term to long-term. In our ongoing practice of observing and studying children’s play, we can choose to “toss back” invitations and opportunities around ideas of bias and fairness, that fall somewhere on this spectrum.