Diversity Equity Inclusion Topic: Model Minority

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Asian American Books & Read-Alouds:

(CHINESE) Uncle Peter’s Amazing Chinese Wedding by Lenore Look & Yumi Heo

(KOREAN) Dear Juno by Soyung Pak (author) & Susan Kathleen Hartung (illustrator)

(KOREAN) Bee-Bim Bap! By Linda Sue Park (author) & Ho Baek Lee (illustrator)

(JAPANESE) Suki’s Kimono by Chieri Uegaki (author) & Stéphane Jorish (illustrator)

(INDIAN) Hot Hot Roti for Dada-ji by Farhana Zia (author) & Ken Min (illustrator)

(FILIPINO) Cora Cooks Pancit by Dorina K. Lazo Gilmore (author) & Kristi Valiant (illustrator)

(CAMBODIAN) A Path of Stars by Anne Sibley O’Brien 

Transcript for Podcast Lesson on Model Minority with Dr. Wu

Jenny Woo: Welcome to 52 Essential Conversations. I'm Jenny and I'm sitting next to Judy Tzu-Chun Wu who is a professor and chair of the Department of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Irvine. She received her PhD in US History from Stanford University and previously taught for 17 years at Ohio State University. Her research and teaching focus on analyzing intersecting social hierarchies such as those based on race, gender, sexuality, and citizenship. She is particularly interested in understanding how individuals form identities and navigate social and equalities. She has authored multiple books including Radicals on the Road: Internationalism, Orientalism, and Feminism during the Vietnam Era. Her current book projects explore the political career of Patsy Takemoto Mink, the first woman of color U.S. Congressional Representative and the cosponsor of Title IX. Welcome, Judy.

 Judy Wu: Thank you so much. I'm excited to participate in this conversation.

Jenny Woo: On this topic of implicit bias, when I saw your work, I said I must interview her and I'm really curious about your definition of what Model Minority means.

Judy Wu: I think this question about how Asian Americans or Chinese Americans are perceived in this country are very much shaped by this idea of the model minority of being model minorities and that idea assumes that they are the best among all the marginalized groups, which automatically pits them against other marginalized groups particularly African-Americans, Chicano Latinos, and American Indians. The assumption is that for Asian-Americans that they have worked hard, they have strong families and that they have achieved educational success, economic success, and they have done so without having to advocate for change and without having to have government intervention. 

Judy Wu:  And the idea of the model minority really upholds this idea of the United States is a meritocracy a place where anybody around the world can come in, and if they work hard, they will achieve success. This representation really erases systematic discrimination in races as well. The activism that Asian American communities have engaged in.

Jenny Woo: That's a great definition and it puts the onus on the individual: "well you know so-and-so can do it and this is how it's done. If you just put in more effort and time this American dream is going to arrive." Tell me more about your involvement in this. How how did you personally decide that this is your vision, and this was important for you.

Judy Wu: I am an immigrant, so I came to the United States when I was 6 with my family and we grew up in where I grew up in Spokane, Washington, which is a predominately white community. And I definitely felt like an outsider. Like a lot of immigrants, my family experiences downward mobility. My parents were more professionals in Taiwan but in the United States they worked really long hours in restaurants and convenience stores, and they relied on family labor. I grew up helping my parents run these family stores and just experiencing being made fun of or feeling like an outcast because of language or food or cultural practices. And I didn't really initially have this the language or the concepts to understand what we were experiencing until I went to college and became exposed to ethnic studies classes. Taking classes on Afro-American literature or Latino politics and advocating for Asian record studies classes so that we could learn about each other's histories and cultures and understand where we fit within the United States and how our very presence in many ways challenges fundamental ideas about what it means to be American.

Jenny Woo: Tell me more about where we fit. This checking off the box and creating our own box is such a hot debate these days given the political context. As a parent and an educator, what do you say to your students or your children?

Judy Wu: I teach Asian American Studies at UC Irvine and I really emphasize that Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders have a very ambivalent relationship to the U.S. nation. 

Judy Wu: Before we were model minorities, we were aliens and eligible for citizenship or we were nationals because the United States had colonized places like the Philippines or different parts of the Pacific Islands. We were actually excluded from the nation. It didn't matter how long people had been in the country, but they can never become U.S. citizens under the category of alien and eligible for citizenship or they were unequally incorporated so they were not aliens but they were not citizens either.

Jenny Woo: That position of being marginalized and excluded that still persists even though there is now the representation of model minority. So when the United States engages in economic competition with Asian countries--when engages in wars in Asian countries those fears about Asia or this idea of Yellow Peril recurs and so I think the current day position being made of minorities in some ways still carries with it this fear of yellow peril that we are somehow better and more competitive that we can be a threat. Whether it's in schools whether it's in the economy, whether it's national security, I think schools are a particularly important site for trying to understand and navigate some of those racial tensions. Our population within schools are so diverse now. And sometimes the curriculum hasn't quite caught up to the diversity of the student population. I see efforts by schools to do so to really think about the diverse histories of people who are here but sometimes they're not as well equipped addressing those issues. And so those tensions can either continue to simmer or they can be exacerbated, or they can be addressed within schools as well.

Jenny Woo:  I'm really curious as far as what's addressed within schools, and what you think in that sense. But I'd love to share a little bit of my personal background on this topic. I immigrated to the United States, to Texas when I was almost 10, not knowing a single word of English or alphabet, and trying to fit in.

Jenny Woo: I really struggled, and I really tried. And I remember the first day of school there was a math problem. Of course, this is very stereotypical because we had learned more math earlier and more intensively in China. I raised my hand and used my fingers to give it a number and that maybe only a couple of numbers that I really just learned. And over the years I was one of the two Chinese students in the ESL class at the time. But later on, I begin to notice this tension within myself of trying to cover what I was really good at, so that I can fit in. But in other senses, using those values to show that I'm good at something by standing out. This tension--if that also carries within schools and for other students. So now going back to the question: how do we address this in schools? What can we do? What are some of your thoughts?

Judy Wu: Yeah, I think the pressure or assumption of being model minorities is very much experienced by Asian-American students. So sometimes they're a subject of resentment because other groups feel like: "well how are they able to succeed? Apparently so easily that it's somehow inherent to their culture or to their group." And then, there are also students in which learning doesn't come naturally. Right. And even if they are of Asian-American background they're assumed to succeed but they struggle whether it's with math or science or with language. And in some ways, they're seen as disappointments because they're naturally assumed to be culturally and educationally successful. And that can cause real issues because maybe the school does not provide intervention support programs for those students because they don't recognize that they need that it can cause issues of mental distress among the students. And I definitely see that even at the college level. People having difficulties with sleeping, with family community pressures. It is there's a host of issues that arise because there are assumptions of Asian kids being out of minorities. In terms of what can be done, I think to really consider the needs of and of those students not as a cultural group or as a racial group. But in terms of what they need to succeed educationally.

Jenny Woo: That's a great point. And there are certainly specific language or questions that I can think of that parents might ask or even comparisons: "So and so you know is doing this and why aren't you doing it?" that type of thing really sets the pressure and frames the sense of normalcy and that is really individually based and contextually defined then as a cultural group. So now let's put on the parent hat, what are some things you've learned as a parent raising children in today's age that the difficulties that you have noticed them encountering? How do you mitigate that?

Judy Wu: It's interesting because my children who are now 11 and 15, they grew up part of the time in Ohio, which is a very different demographic compared to Orange County.

Judy Wu: And we also spent a year in Germany and so they've been in different types of educational environments, and the neighborhood I lived in Ohio was a very close-knit when we would go to the neighborhood library and the librarians all knew the names of our children. But at the same time, it was rather relatively racially homogenous. I remember when I first gave birth to my older son and we were just taking a walk around the neighborhood. Someone came up and said oh he's China or they might have even said it's China. It was just was not a kind of cultural understanding about how to address a child or a parent of an Asian child.

Judy Wu: Also, my husband is not Asian-American, and so we've had encounters where people have asked if he was the parent of our child, who's been a phenotypically mixed, They just assume that the father could not possibly be the parent of the child. There's that type of just daily encounters I guess you can consider the micro-aggressions although I think when you experience that they don't feel like micro.

Judy Wu: And I think sometimes that is part of the children's reaction sometimes they're not.

Judy Wu: Sometimes children are really oblivious to racial difference. That doesn't mean they learn over time. In Orange County, it's a very different setting.

Judy Wu: There is a lot of different Asian-American communities. And that's one of the reasons why I was really excited about moving here. In the school districts where we're in, these are well-funded well-supported schools.

Judy Wu: And I don't know if the students are still having those types of conversations about race and racial difference in the classroom because even when there's a larger population, there could still be those types of conversations about differences. I'd like it when my kids form relationships with both people who look like them and who don't look like them. We come from different backgrounds, who can share their interests. I went on a field trip with my younger son. They went to Riverside. I can't remember the name of it but it’s kind of like an orange citrus museum and it documented the history of the orange industry in California. But it wasn't just like a kind of a great People's History of the Orange County know, the orange industry. It wasn't just the white Anglo pioneers that created it, but it was really also about the people of color, who worked in the fields who harvested the oranges.

 Jenny Woo: And that included Asian immigrants Mexican Americans. And it also talked about the ways in which the orange traveled around the world from southern China to end up in the United States. So, I really appreciate that type of history, which I think is a much more inclusive one, in terms of race, in terms of class, and in terms of having a global understanding of how we experience what we experienced today. I really appreciate those efforts in the school district and in public institutions and public museums.

Jenny Woo: These are such concrete examples of what we can do as educators and parents to really showcase this inclusion in terms of how we describe the history of something or even the creation of a product--all the players that have participated in it in different capacities. And it's interesting you mentioned earlier: we might be alert and some of these implicit biases the undertones of micro-aggression when our children are happily oblivious to that and so, my last question is: "when is the right time or if they're just oblivious and so inclusive themselves, is it necessary to highlight that? How do you deal with that? 

Judy Wu: That's a really great question. I think for some families it's not a choice. I think about the anti-black violence that has been committed by both the police and everyday citizens. And I think in those settings it will be very hard for the parents not to tell their children as soon as possible about what it means to be black in this society. You know I think I look for opportunities to try to engage with my kids. I can't remember which child it was coming home and talked to me about what they were learning in school in terms of the civil rights movement and segregation. But they described it as black people not wanting to be on the same bus or share resources like white people.

Judy Wu: And I don't think that's what the school was teaching them. But in their minds, that's what they got. I felt like I was "no no no. Let me explain segregation."

Judy Wu: Or my son recently was doing a project related to imperialism colonialism, and I think there's this liberal approach like let's talk about the benefits of imperialism, colonialism, and let's talk about the negative impacts. I'm like No. There are no positive impacts of imperialism colonialism at least for the people who've been colonized. There are more nuanced ways of thinking about it. But I think sometimes you just have to kind of call out.

Judy Wu: Racial hierarchy racial discrimination. And sometimes popular culture is a way to do this as well. When we lived in Ohio, there was a neighbor who's white and who had adopted an African American child. And Similar to I think was Kung Fu Panda 2 have come Fu Panda 3, where Po didn't realize that he was adopted but even though his father's a goose.

Judy Wu: My son's like "Oh! I didn't realize the child was adopted!" Right? In his mind, there doesn't need to be an explanation about the parent and the child having different racial backgrounds. In some ways, I like that that he doesn't assume that there's no biological connection. But it's also an opportunity to think about how we construct race or how do we define race. I think it's really important to try to engage in those types of conversations with children when there's an opportunity but also when there's a need. 

Jenny Woo: Well said. Thank you so much for your time, Judy.

Judy Wu: Thanks so much for the opportunity.

Jenny Woo: And thank you, for listening to 52 Essential Conversations.

Implicit Bias Topic: Language

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Transcript for Podcast Lesson on Language with Dr. Pena

Jenny Woo: I'm excited to be sitting next to Dr. Elizabeth Pena today and we're going to talk about the topic of implicit bias. Elizabeth Pena is a professor in the School of Education at the University of California, Irvine. She's a certified Speech Language Pathologist and is a Fellow of the American Speech Language Hearing Association. She focuses on how children from diverse linguistic backgrounds learn new language skills and the language impairment that might happen in those children. Her research also focuses on the development and evaluation of test assessments that accurately provide insights on language impairments vs. language differences. Welcome! Why don't we get started with a card on the topic of implicit bias on the 52 Essential Conversations? Let's read it from the perspective of a student that has been misunderstood. 

Elizabeth Pena: OK. A Time that a child might be teased or named called on the basis of their language. I think that we make a lot of assumptions on the basis of whether we can communicate with somebody or not. When a child is in a school setting and they can't speak English, and the majority of the school day is in English, then there might be assumptions made about whether that child speaks English or not. And then, it'll carry over to assumptions about whether they can understand or not, whether they can hear or not, and whether they're smarter or not. Those are the things that I think occur when children enter into a setting where their language isn't available to them and people aren't using their language. And I'm one of those kids too, actually. I started kindergarten not knowing English, and my mom says that we learned English at the same time. My parents are immigrants. I was born in the U.S. and I had some English exposure prior to kindergarten but kindergarten was the time that I started being completely immersed in English. I don't have clear memories of that but I can imagine that you're all of a sudden in this environment where everybody's speaking a language that you don't completely understand. And the opportunities for mismatch can be great.

Jenny Woo: Yeah. Let's talk about more about the mismatch incidents. The picture that you've painted is incredibly visual. I see a real-life of a child. It's already incredibly scary to not understand the language people are communicating and to not be able to communicate. To use my own personal experience, I felt like a mute but on top of that, the part where you study is how is that is being perceived and carried on. Tell me more about some of the biggest assumptions that you're seeing in the field as a researcher and as a Speech Language Pathologist in schools and home environments around these labels.

Elizabeth Pena: I've been in this field for over 30 years. I first started working as a Speech-Language Pathologist in school settings, preschool, and elementary school settings. And I do remember I was asked to come and do consult in a school district where every single Spanish speaking child had been identified with language delays or language impairment. And I talked to the Speech Pathologist there and I said this isn't possible. Of course, it wasn't possible and that's why they asked me to come in and consult. And they wanted me to reassess all these kids. And I said, well, let's talk and think this through. How did this happen? How did these kids come to being identified as having language impairment? The Speech Pathologist who spoke only English had done standardized testing with these kids in English. On the basis of mainly vocabulary tests, she found that they were very very low, which would make sense if English isn't their first language or their better language. It would make sense that they scored low on the vocabulary test--they couldn't understand the names of things they couldn't name things in English. They made a lot of errors. I went back and said, "okay, well what else did you do?" One of the things that she had done that were really nice was that she had observed them in the classroom and saw that a lot of these kids were communicating well with each other. They could have good conversational turn-taking. They seem to be using complete sentences. There were a couple of kids who seemed to be having much more difficulty making their needs known among their peers who spoke Spanish. You can observe those things. We rescreened all these kids and those couple of kids that she had identified as having problems communicating with peers actually turned out to be the children who truly had language disability and the other kids were typical learners who were in the process of learning English as a second language. But I think we see these kinds of assumptions. Making these wrong diagnoses can lead to negative outcomes for these kids because if you have a language delay, then you might get tracked in two different kinds of curriculum or you might receive the support that you didn't really need. As a result, you're missing out on the classroom curriculum and that kind of thing. Certainly, if kids truly have language impairment, then they need to be getting the support that they need in order to start to close the gap. Probably what we see now is the other end of this. And that is under-identification. When I started out my career, we saw a lot of overidentification, and so the work that I was trying to do was to reduce the overidentification of language impairment in children who were learning English as a Second Language. I think now what we're starting to see is when children speak a language other than English at home, then every area that children make or every difficulty that they might have in a classroom setting in English is attributed to second language acquisition. That's not the case either. We can have children who have both delays and are in the process of learning English as a second language.

Jenny Woo: That that definitely layers on the complexity. I can also see the implications of the type of recommendations that educators might provide. If you're bilingual, you're trying to learn but they're blaming it on the fact that you're learning both languages at the same time. How is that being dealt with? 

Elizabeth Pena: That's a huge challenge. What I've seen is some families are afraid to speak their home language to their child because they fear that it'll be confusing. We know that actually bilingualism is not confusing. Most of the world is bilingual people and they are not confused. That's something that we have to really be careful and help families support the use of the first language in the home. And it's the language in which they communicate on which you build relationships. It's the language that you use to communicate across generations, which is often the language of the home. That's going to be really critical in supporting that child. Of course, children need to learn English as a second language. But you don't want to do it at the cost in fact losing the first line. I think we need to be really careful in not implying that children should stop using their home language and shift to English. The other thing that happens is sometimes when families try to do that, they themselves don't speak complex English. The models that they may provide are not the higher-level models that they would be able to provide in their home language. You want to have those deep conversations that get into ideas and questions around life and interactions and kinds of conversations that you have that form those deep relationships, and that takes complex language to that. If the families don't speak English at that level, it's going to be hard to do. So, if you can provide that in the home language, that's going to be really critical.

Jenny Woo: That is so insightful. Sometimes as parents we want to be as helpful to the growth and the learning of our children as possible. But ironically, the example you gave us exactly what not to do. And you're thinking that you're helping. This reminds me of my personal experience as a school administrator for a Mandarin immersion Montessori preschool. You can imagine in preschool, right before you enter in first grade, parents are starting to get stressed, like "oh my gosh my kid didn't go to a traditional kindergarten has been in this Mandarin immersion. What do I do?" I used to get a lot of questions around do I speak Mandarin at home, or do I speak English at home. Is my child going to catch up? That's one. The second one is "should we practice with the child in Mandarin?" This is, in particular, coming from parents who really celebrate Mandarin but don't quite know how to speak it or are trying to learn it at the same time. You're right. The complexity of those linguistic usages is really not there. And so that type of modeling perhaps isn't as effective or even necessary. We've always advocated for bilingualism because there are researchers out there, and in fact, one of my professors at Harvard Graduate School of Education, Gigi Luk, who studied bilingualism and actually bilingualism with children with developmental language disorders. So yeah, parents stressed not: do what you're good at.

 Elizabeth Pena: Yup. Do what you're good at. That's really the bottom line. Read to your child, do those things and it's OK to do it in your better language to help promote that child's ideas, and they're going to be able to attach English to it as they get into school and as they're learning English.

Jenny Woo: I love how we touched upon these parenting myths and assumptions. Let's go back to the schools. I just love your work and you mentioned another latest thing that you're seeing that's been really frustrating is having families with children with language impairments being told that they should just focus on one language. You know especially when the home language is not English.

 Elizabeth Pena:  I think you see the same kind of thing happen. If we have children who have language disabilities or developmental language disorders or any other kind of disability that might affect language, often then there's an assumption that two languages are going to be too complex. One language is already complex math, two is going to make it twice as hard. And that's not at all true. There's this idea around desirable difficulties. Things that are hard are sometimes really good for us. That's where you're where you grow, where your brain grows, where you develop new skills and new insights into things. Language is a hard thing to learn and for some children, it's especially hard. And kids with DLD. It's the disorder where everything looks really typical, but kids are having a really hard time learning language and we don't really understand the underlying causes of it. It's really hard for them. Learning two languages is going to be hard too, but for whatever reason, it doesn't make you more delayed. Right. It doesn't make kids who are bilingual who have language impairment more delayed than monolingual kids with language impairment. Actually, bilingualism could be helpful. We're starting to see some evidence that just like bilingualism could help slow down the onset of Alzheimer's, bilingualism may be helpful for children with DLD.

Jenny Woo: Oh interesting. Wow, that is really exciting. And it reminded me of the Medical School class with Harvard professors, and they did mention the critical period for children as babies. The day that you're born, essentially. Our ability to recognize different intonations. Use it or leave it. It's going to be gone if you don't use it right.

Elizabeth Pena: You hear the sounds of your language and you recognize them, and babies can understand all these different sounds and sound contrasts and as they start to learn their own language, they lose the ability to tell the differences among sounds that are not in the language that they're learning. So bilingual kids can keep that window open a bit more. They have exposure to those different languages and can make those contrasts for a longer period of time. And that could help them. 

Elizabeth Pena: And I think the same kind of thing in learning grammar, for example, or learning vocabulary, different languages have different ways of expressing. Learning to do it in two different ways could be a good mental exercise. It's cognitive flexibility. It gives you that flexibility in this language you express it this way, but in this other language, you express it a different way. That gives kids insights about how languages work.

Jenny Woo: As a parent and as an educator, I really recognize the importance of learning even the language of math and the language of music and how that enhances your cognitive inhibition, shifting, executive function and those are all so interrelated. So, as informed parents, say that if I'm a parent of a child who is an English Language Learner so learning English for the first time with the home language, and I found out that my child has been misdiagnosed as having language impairment by the school. What can I do as a parent to advocate for my child?

Elizabeth Pena: As a parent you have rights. You have the right to participate in the IEP process, the Individual Education Plan. You have to be informed if they're going to do an individualized assessment of your child. If you don't think that anything is going on, you can refuse to consent to the assessment. If you think your child is performing within normal limits in their home language, then you can convey that during the IEP meeting. You can also ask for them to assess your child in their primary language. I think the best way of knowing whether a child does or doesn't have a developmental language disability is by testing them in both of their languages and putting that information together. So those are ways I think that you'd want to advocate for your child.

Elizabeth Pena: It could go the other way too though. You might think that your child has a developmental language disability. And the school may say well let's give them a little bit more time so that they can learn English. I think that's the trend that I'm seeing now, and I think that you need to push them to do an evaluation if you're concerned. I find that if families are concerned, if parents are concerned, then there's usually something going on. I think it's really important that you learn to be pushy and ask for that evaluation, ask for that evaluation in the home language, and don't wait. We know that early interventions are going to result in the best outcomes for kids. We want to start doing that therapy as soon as we possibly can. The other thing is if your child does have a DLD, do not let them tell you that you can't or that you shouldn't speak your home language. You can and you should. You don't want your child to miss those connections with extended family with grandparents, especially if grandparents only speak your home language. You want your child. You want to give your child every advantage that you can. Bilingualism is an advantage and you want to be able to give them that gift.

Jenny Woo: That is so reassuring. I'm saying that from the perspective of friends who are going through that. It's very viscerally close to home because I can certainly as a parent imagine that you're panicking. You're so frustrated and you just want your child to succeed. You try all you can to work on this English language. And unfortunately, it is at the detriment of cultural heritage. Let's talk a little bit more about inclusive learning culture or a learning environment because this reminds me of universal design for learning. In that case, I've seen more done as reading, seeing a video clip, or hearing it. But this takes it perhaps one step further and respecting your home language, bringing that into the classroom. What are some of the best practices now with your educator hat on that you see done in the classrooms?

 Elizabeth Pena: Sometimes when we're focused on bilingualism and we want to support the home language, we do support the home language but sometimes we do it at a low level. We might do it at the interpersonal communication level but not at the academic level. We need to consider academic language as well as interpersonal language. The language we use to talk to our friends is one style or one level of language. What we use to write reports, to use more sophisticated ideas to do science and social sciences, or to talk about literature has a greater language demand. Sometimes we think about bilingualism as using two languages, but we have to also think about what we're doing in each of those two languages. Not just that they're present but are we thinking about literature in two languages or rethinking about science. We're having these conversations around relationships in two languages and what children need to be able to do, what language they need, what words they need, and what vocabulary they need to be able to meet these different kinds of demands. Not just the everyday conversations of getting ready for school and coming home after school or doing homework or whatever, but really meeting these academic demands of the home language as well as in English. This is something that I think that sometimes we miss out on. It's hard to do. It's definitely more demanding. It's hard to find somebody who can teach science in another language because they were trained and often trained in the U.S. and they learned those terms that terminology in English. We need to be a little more thoughtful about supporting higher levels of language learning.

Jenny Woo: So fascinating. Anything you'd like to leave with the parents or teachers?

Elizabeth Pena: I think my bottom-line message is bilingualism is good for you. Don't give it up. It's something that your child will thank you for even if they don't thank you for it. Like piano lessons, right?

Jenny Woo: I hope my son will hear this someday. It's been documented. Thank you so much.

Elizabeth Pena: Thank you.

Jenny Woo: And thank you for tuning into 52 Essential Conversations.

Diversity, Equity, Inclusion Topic: Race

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Children’s books celebrating diversity and differences (click for more info):

Books for middle school and high school studies that broaden perspectives (source: Harvard Graduate School of Education):

Transcript for Podcast Lesson on Race with Ivonne

Jenny Woo: Today we are sitting here with Yvonne Ortega talking about implicit bias. Yvonne is an early education professional with a master’s degree in instructional leadership. She is currently launching the National Anti-racist Early Education Network, which supports schools in applying principles of anti-racism to their work with young children. Welcome, Ivonne.

Jenny Woo: Tell us about this really complex hardpacked concept of implicit bias. What is it? 

Ivonne Ortega: Implicit bias is stereotypes that we all carry around, either consciously or unconsciously that we use to inform the decisions that we make in our lives. 

Jenny Woo: This concept is so important and certainly, it shapes how we view the world, each other, and ourselves. What do I do? When do I start to talk about this topic with my preschoolers, for example? 

Ivonne Ortega: I taught preschool for about five years in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and I noticed as a teacher that the biases that I held that came out in my classroom--children were keenly aware. They use that information to make their own decisions. At that age, it's really important to model what it means to be aware of those biases. Questioning what we do and not in a way where you're constantly neurotic.

Ivonne Ortega: There's plenty of other biases that I might have. For example, thinking about toys that are for girls and toys that are for boys. While marketing might tell us these are toys that boys will like and these are toys that girls will like, there is no science that tells us that girls implicitly like the color pink for example or that it's natural for boys not to want to wear a dress or something like that. So as a teacher, it's important for me to question those things and young children who are so naturally curious. They're constantly exploring those things until they learn that it's not OK. They learn that "well I'm a girl I shouldn't be playing in the block space, I should be making art or I should be playing in the home space." That's something that children learn over time. As an educator, I think it's important for me to notice when that's happening and encourage children to see themselves as whole people who are capable of doing many different things and exploring lots of different topics and ideas.

Jenny Woo: To tie in, what I'm hearing is this sense of language and self-awareness, and checking herself starts with the adults and understanding are there things that you are looking at perhaps are very much shaped by your own personal biases. But I want to talk a little bit more about the social and cultural norms of the mainstream. Sometimes there is certainly pressure when my daughter is playing with Legos and then all of her friends are playing with Barbie dolls. What do I do?

Ivonne Ortega:  Yeah, that's a tricky question, and I think a lot of parents get caught up in that because of course, every child wants to be a part of a group. They want to have friends and that's important to being humans, as to working with others. If your interests are different, and you noticed that they're different, and you as a parent also noticed that, it can be challenging. I think what's important is to encourage your daughter's interest in Legos and also inviting her peers to do those things with her and make that type of learning really exciting to the children.

Jenny Woo: Then on the flip side, as parents, we try to expose our children to a wide array of different extracurriculars and toys and things to perk up their interest and seeing where the stickiness is. What happens when this stickiness is just so strongly aligned with the very traditional modeling of mindset--those traditional roles. How do you balance that tension of still allowing them to be but also continuing to layer on the other perspectives?

Ivonne Ortega:  That's a great question. What's most important is that you're validating their feelings and their interests. Even if their interests are aligned with what's mainstream. I think as a parent you can question how you might be putting those biases on your child. But in terms of a girl child who likes ballet and likes dressing up and likes the idea of looking "pretty," for example, that's not something that you want to tell your child is not okay or they should be focused on being a strong woman or strong girl or they should really be thinking about science instead of thinking about fashion or design or things like that. It's most important to validate children's experiences and feelings and interests while still exposing them to a variety of things.

Ivonne Ortega: It's not effective when here when you're pushing an idea or an activity on your child that they can be resistant. I mean, naturally are resistant to that. But to validate what they're thinking and feeling, but also keep their world open. Showing them different literature books, people who might be pushing the boundaries, and pushing on those societal norms that we all face.

Jenny Woo: Well said. What about especially with younger children. And I say this as a parent of three very different children. They've all came to me at very different times in their lives noticing you know whether it's demographics and certain stereotypes, they asked me that. But when do we bring that up or do we wait for them to actually be the ones to initiate?

Ivonne Ortega: I get that question a lot. With young children, it's important that we equip them with the language to have difficult conversations about race, about differences, about gender, etc. Even before they have the language to talk about those things, they are seeing racism play out in their lives. They may be questioning it nonverbally. When we know that they're seeing an act of racism or oppression happening, it's our job as adults to narrate what's happening for them because they don't have the language to talk about it. And as they grow older, if we don't equip them with that language and show them that it's important to have these conversations, then children get the message that it's not OK to talk about race. It's not OK to talk about difference and then they grow up to be adults who can't have those difficult conversations.

Jenny Woo: That's a great point at almost reminded me of the very simple example of labeling anatomy parts. You have these code names that sound really cutesy, but at the end of the day, they have to be provided the language to objectively name it and understand what it is. You mentioned as they grow older, equipping them with the language. What can we do as they grow older? Are there other tips that we can do as parents?

Ivonne Ortega: Honestly, I think it's versions of the same thing--the same types of noticing and language that you would use with a young child. You're kind of just amping that up as they get older. Asking them questions about what they see and what they notice. Giving them opportunities to be in dialogue with you about what they see in the world. I want to give a short plug for the Anti-racist Early Education Network. We believe that it is vital that children are equipped with the language to talk about racism so that they can grow to be critical thinkers who are capable of dismantling racism. Without that language and without that critical thinking skills that start very young: two, three years old, they will be able to have the language to talk about this as adults in ways that today we're not able to as a nation.

Jenny Woo: Yeah, exactly. It sounds like the adults like us need it even more at this time to begin to even model the right behavior in self-awareness. Tell me more about your network.

Ivonne Ortega: The Anti-racist Early Education Network, our theory of change is grounded in the belief that young children must be intentionally introduced to language about racism, so they can grow to be critical thinkers capable of dismantling racism. That theory of change really came from the question of how do we have conversations with young children about different oppressions, particularly racism, that we see and exist in our world that children are exposed to but are not encouraged to talk about. What the network does is that it works with schools that are currently engaging in anti-racism work in their school or racial justice work in their school, and it pairs them with another school that is also doing that work or is interested in it. Those two schools together create a professional learning community where they can discuss and dialogue about how to push their work forward. Not everyone is doing anti-racism work, especially in early education, and it's so important that people who are doing the work are in community with each other because they're all speaking the same language. You might be able to talk to a school that's down the street from you about best practices and how do they increase parent engagement and what are their policies like, but if they don't have the same values that your school does then you're not going to get very far. The purpose of the network is to connect these schools to create communities where they can really support each other and being anti-racist school communities.

Jenny Woo: Wow. Where were you when I was an early childhood school administrator? That Sounds so useful, and especially for the more homogenous communities. It empowers the types of language and awareness through the multiplier effect of the network to really talk about it and have additional toolsets that we can use for our children.

Jenny Woo: Any parting words in terms of good resources or books that we can look in to?

Ivonne Ortega: There's a book I really love to read to my class. It's called One of a Kind, Like Me by Laurin Mayeno and illustrated by Robert Liu-Trujillo. It's a story of a boy who wants to dress up as a princess for Halloween and his family supports him in making the costume. Then, he goes to school and is not well received by his classmates. He experiences teasing. What I really like about the story is that the child is then put in a position where he can either feel bad about himself and the fact that he is not adjusting to these norms or he can advocate for himself. In the story, the boy does advocate for himself and just says in the simplest way that children do: "boys can be princesses too." In the story, the other child who's doing the teasing just pauses and thinks about that statement. Instead of retreating and saying, "no this is the way things are." It's a moment of "oh! I hadn't thought about that." I think that's really the approach that I want to encourage teachers and parents and children to take when we encounter implicit bias.

Jenny Woo:  I love that. It's like the questions of why, And why not. And with that, thank you so much for being here.

Ivonne Ortega: Thank you, Jenny.

Jenny Woo: Thank you for tuning into 52 Essential Conversations.