After have had a number of visitors from other countries at our preschool over this past year. Questions have been raised regarding to how equality is taught.
One of the questions we get from visitors is: when do we teach children about equality?
When I am answering this question the visitor seems to become a little disappointed.
They want see and document our methodology separate from our everyday engagement with the children.
But we are not educating equality separately from what we do daily.
In fact we are not teaching equality.
What we, teachers, are trying to do is to supervise ourselves to eradicate bias towards girls or boys, different ages, class, disability, religion and ethnicity.
But one thing we do is to teach the children to discuss from their point of view.
Different opinions will make children understand the complexity and variety of we human beings and world we live in.
All children want to be included in a group, this is how human beings function.
If we have an understanding that a group of children includes two groups, boys and girls, what the children will do is to try their best to find out what is included in their particular gender.
This makes our focus as teachers easier when we can recognise their predicational behaviour of stereotypes.
Or we can engage the children from an aspect of their point of view when we are engaging them with different aspects of thinking.
From there, we can give them a chance to both feel they are important in the group and teach them that groups are built from having different thoughts, but sharing the same drive of exploring the complexity of the world.
If children do not feel that they have to adjust because of gender they can feel free to seek for new answers.
We live in a time that needs both equality and new solutions.