Segregation by Experience: Agency, Racism, and Learning in the Early Grades
Jennifer Keys Adair and Kiyomi Sánchez-Suzuki Colegrove
Abstract
In this ethnography, the authors spend time with a first-grade classroom led by Ms. Bailey, a teacher who speaks four languages and immigrated from Burundi as a young adult. Ms. Bailey’s class included mostly children of color, many of whom spoke more than one language. Collectively and individually the class had many opportunities to enact their agency as part of their learning. The children could move around, discuss ideas, work together, design projects, initiate activities, talk about their real lives and help one another. The authors also spend time with over 250 superintendents, principa ... More
In this ethnography, the authors spend time with a first-grade classroom led by Ms. Bailey, a teacher who speaks four languages and immigrated from Burundi as a young adult. Ms. Bailey’s class included mostly children of color, many of whom spoke more than one language. Collectively and individually the class had many opportunities to enact their agency as part of their learning. The children could move around, discuss ideas, work together, design projects, initiate activities, talk about their real lives and help one another. The authors also spend time with over 250 superintendents, principals, teachers, immigrant parents and young children ages 5-7 across Texas who watched a twenty minute film of Ms. Bailey’s classroom and had complicated, often negative, responses to what they saw. Using Charles Mill’s concept of the Racial Contract and by engaging work across Latinx, Indigenous and Black diaspora theorizations of race and white supremacy, the authors try to make sense of what the interviews, the film, and the negative reactions to the film mean for the “great equalizer” of early childhood education. How does racism impact what we offer young children at school? And what does it mean for children and families to see school learning as something that requires their obedience rather than their full personhood?
Keywords:
early childhood education,
agency,
video-cued ethnography,
racism,
white supremacy,
project based learning,
children of color,
Black teachers,
family school relationships,
children’s development
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2021 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780226765587 |
| Published to Chicago Scholarship Online: January 2022 |
DOI:10.7208/chicago/9780226765754.001.0001 |
Authors
Affiliations are at time of print publication.
Jennifer Keys Adair, author
University of Texas at Austin
Kiyomi Sánchez-Suzuki Colegrove, author
Texas State University
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