Greetings blog readers,
I invite you to read my latest article (published May 11, 2023) which has been accepted for a future issue of the Journal of Early Childhood Teacher Education. It is already published now in Open Access and is freely available to all readers. This article is focused on deficit and damage- based educator talk about targeted children and families.
My long experience in working as a professor with university students in rural, urban, and suburban schools has inspired my focus on denigrating and deficit-based educator talk. We teacher educators who become routine school visitors often gain insights into the unguarded daily life of administrators, teachers, and children. It became clear to me that many highly regarded educators did not consider denigrating and deficit-based talk (beyond the hearing of children and families) to be unethical. Rather, they seemed to believe that such talk had no influence on their professional practice. Yet I came to believe that deficit-based and denigrating talk deeply affected the ways in which children with targeted diversities were received and treated in the process of education.
I approach this problem as an explicit topic within anti-racist and anti-bias education. In this article, I center deficit-based educator talk in the larger issue of dehumanization. I have made specific recommendations for teacher educator reflection and practice that are grounded in four intersecting theories.
Although dehumanizing educator talk is a problem across Pre-K/16 education, I have focused in this article on early childhood teacher education. I have always loved early childhood education, and specialized in it during my doctoral studies at Teachers College, Columbia University. It is early childhood educators who encounter children as their first experiences in care and formal education begin. If early childhood teacher educators enact a specific challenge to dehumanizing educator talk, they can create new narratives of hope and possibility for all children and families. Hopefully these narratives will follow children into their later educational experiences.
Beatrice S. Fennimore (2023) Dismantling dehumanizing educator talk about children and families: the moral imperative for early childhood teacher educators, Journal of Early Childhood Teacher Education, DOI: 10.1080/10901027.2023.2204306
This blog is written by Beatrice Fennimore (Bz Fennimore) an educator and activist whose career has focused on child advocacy, public school equity, social justice, and the practice of anti-bias education. https://www.bzfennimore.