80x3 Podcast Series: Focusing on Equity to Create Inclusive and Welcoming Early Childhood Environments - Part 1

4:01AM Jul 16, 2024

Speakers:

Narrator

Priscilla W.

Beth Menninga

Dr. Nicole Evans

Keywords:

inclusive environments

equity foundation

personal development

culture climate

structures systems

transformative change

family partnerships

expulsion rates

co-parenting

care team

authentic celebration

joyful hope

professional development

systemic change

inclusive childcare

Welcome to Inclusion Matters, a podcast about children's development from the Center for Inclusive Child Care.

Welcome to Inclusion Matters, a podcast from the Center for Inclusive Child Care. I'm Priscilla Weigel, the executive director, and I am so excited today to be here to start our conversation. We are having a wonderful opportunity through the Greater Twin Cities, United Way 80x3 Initiative that is really behind this podcast series with Embracing Equity and Dr Nicole Evans, and I'm here with Beth Menninga, our coaching manager, who has had the great opportunity as also part of the 80x3 Initiative to be a part of the Embracing Equity Leadership Cohort. And this has been just a transformative opportunity for our organization, for all the individuals who are a part of it, and we're really excited today to talk with Dr Evans and Beth about really building that inclusive, equitable environment in an early childhood setting. So welcome Beth and Dr Nicole, I'm so excited to be here with you and have this conversation. Let's just jump in.

Welcome, welcome. Thanks, Dr Nicole for joining us. Let's jump in by first starting with you know, why are we talking about this? What makes equity a critical element of those inclusive and welcoming early childhood environments? When you think about we want every child to feel loved and belonging in our programs. How does equity fit into that picture?

This is really the foundation of everything we do. It's the foundation of relationships. It's the foundation of how we interact with one another. It is the foundation I always say equity is not an addition to the plate. It is the plate. It's the plate upon which everything else sits, so that everyone in that environment can thrive, not only the students and the families, but also our early childhood, workers, folks who are in the trenches, so to speak, who are doing this work together. And so equity says, let's look at everybody. Let's make sure that everyone has what they need. Some people mix up equity and equality. Right? Equality is when everyone has the same thing. Equity is what people have to meet their needs. What we like to say at Embracing Equity is equality is when everyone has a shoe. Equity is when everyone has a shoe that fits. So we are striving for equity.

So when we think about our whole organization and starting to address this, or maybe continuing to address it, digging deeper, wherever you are and thinking about this for your organization, when we think about everybody, as you described, everybody, the families, the children, the staff, the administrators, if your family, child care provider, you may have other people in the community that contribute. I know you have a story from your own experience working in a school setting. It would be great, I think, to share your story and hear about that

My story is actually based upon what we believe at Embracing Equity is the way to transform and it's three distinct areas. The first is individual and professional development, personal development. The second lever in this three lever idea is the culture and climate, and the third is a focus and concentration on structures and systems. So if you indeed focus on all three of those things, you will transform. And so for us, I'm going to give you a story. I was a principal at a school, and one of my teachers came up to me and said, Dr Evans, I need your help. I need you to talk to the black girls in my room. I identify as a black woman, and so I was not at all offended by that. I also was dealing with lots of students who had disciplinary issues, right? And so I said, yes, you're right, these girls are not getting along I understand that, you know, bring them to my office and all of that. And so as I began to unpack that, the first thing that I really felt, quite frankly, was embarrassment. Without question, without question, I accepted that viewpoint that black girls were not getting along and they don't get along. I just accepted it, because that was a message, quite frankly, that I had been receiving when I was a child, when I was a young adult, that, oh, black girls can get along, y'all are always fighting with each other, A, B, C and D even up until adulthood, right? No, you can't,you know, be around a bunch of black women without there being drama, right? And so I as I leaned back and thought about those three levers for transformation, which I hadn't thought about at the time, right? I hadn't quite gotten there, but I had to think about it, and I so I had to do that first lever personal development. So the personal development that I did around that was I need to change my relationship with the other black women in my life. And so I did that. I started doing that. And then on that first lever, professional development. What professional development needed to happen at my school so that if, surely, if I believe that, my staff believed that, and it was true, so we had to do some development. And so we did a book study with Monique Morrison's book called Push Out. And it was talking about how black girls are now being pushed out of school. Because, remember, this was about the black girls in her classroom. Okay, then I went to the next lever, culture and climate. What needed to be true in the culture and climate at my school, so that we all didn't believe this, in addition to the book study that we were doing, right? And so one of the things was we had to talk about who's being referred to the office. Why? Why is that? What's the culture around handling discipline at our school? Were we all on the same page? Did we have shared language? Did we have shared knowledge? What tools did we need to create this culture of climate. And then the third lever was structure and systems. How did this slip through the cracks? We were looking at discipline data across the school, but we did not dig deep enough to see that black girls actually were being referred to the office at a disproportionate rate than any other group of students. So we needed to create a new structure and system to pick that up earlier, and then to decide how we were going to deal with that. So that's a real example of looking at the three levers for transformative change.

Well, it's it's interesting. You're making me think about our history at the Center for Inclusive Child Care and making this partnership work for us. It's been such perfect timing, because, well, first the pandemic hit, and then we had the uprising and the murder of George Floyd. And affecting, we work statewide, affecting some of our coaches more directly than others. We had a coach who lived blacks from the police station, for example. And so we had, all along, we've been kind of, you know, yes, we want, we're the Center for Inclusive Child care, right? We're the Center for Inclusive Child Care and we believe that all children need to be supported to thrive in programs. But it really prompted us to say we need to go a step further and really embed this in our work and as a whole organization, not just coaches or not just a subgroup of staff. And then we had to do some personal learning, too, lots of emotions, very painful. A lot was going on for Minnesota, yes, right at the moment. And so we brought in a consultant for training. We also did, we looked we did a book group. We also did podcasts and conversations and webinars, trying to make it a fit for different learning styles and smaller group conversations and bigger group conversations, just to start that learning and shared language and thinking and learning about history, some people knew more history than others, both in Minnesota and around the nation, around race and equity and and the racialized. trauma that different communities have experienced, starting to learn more about that and share our own personal stories. But also then we said, well, what we need to take action. And so looking at we looked some, started looking at our HR policies, and really are have been taking off with our partnership with Embracing Equity and further looking at that as a whole organization, and our new HR person's done some exciting work in getting people's feedback in a new way that we never did in personnel policies. We never thought about like everyone needs to give some feedback in certain policies. Wow. You know that that's a really different way of thinking about things, and it's going to change how we approach HR policies now really exciting, and that comes out of embracing equity, kind of continuing our work. And then we also looked at so we coaching is where we offer the most services around Minnesota. And where this intersects is in a similar place to your school, in that we see children getting kicked out of programs. And we know nationally, we don't have data specifically which we want. I can look at that more carefully, too, as a part of that organizational structures and systems. But we know nationally, preschoolers are kicked out of programs three times more than older children, and disproportionately children of color, specifically boys, older boys who are bigger, but also Indigenous students as well as children with identified special needs. They're all disproportionately kicked out of programs, and people don't even realize this is going on, and we knew this, so we said we've got to fine tune. We've been hearing from programs all along. You know, we get a call from a parent or program, we're going to kick this child out, or they're going to have to leave, they're not a good fit. And so we really said we've got to sit down and look at this more carefully and create more of a toolkit for ourselves around this topic, because this is where our work intersects. So I'm thinking of programs out there and how you know, where did they start? If your childcare center, who's, you know, providing childcare every day for families and children, where might they be starting in thinking about this.

I think one of the things you said something that really struck something with me, make sure that we are in partnership with families. This is not something, we are power. I always talk about co- powering, not powering over, the powering with right? And so one of the things that, one of the policies, or the practices that we put in in place, was a care team. And the reason why the care team in place, it was a team and the care of this child, and in this care team process, we included the parents. We said, tell us about your child. Were they premature? What is place are they in the family? Any new changes happening? Not saying that you're broken, and we want to fix you, but we want to make sure that we have every single piece of information that you're comfortable sharing that we have at our disposal so that we can create a system of support around this child who, right now, might be just struggling right. The other piece that we did was periodically we met with subgroup of parents. We met with our Black parents, our Hispanic parents, and we said, how we doing y'all, how we doing? There didn't have to be an issue happening because we called ourselves, the school that I was principal at, an A bar school, Montessori, anti bias, anti racist school. Like we we named that from the beginning. And so we're like, yes, we are doing such a great job. And when we had that conversation, the first conversation that we had with our black families, they were like, you're doing all right. And we're like, What do you mean? They say you're doing all right? Here's some areas in which we don't feel welcome, we don't feel a part of and we were, we had a, what I call a clutch your pearls moment. We, we, what do you mean? We're in A bar school, right? We had that clutch your pearl moment, but we had to listen. That's what we found out. So places that are starting, don't forget the homeschool connection. Mm, don't forget the power of that. And please co power, power with, that is what's going to yield you much better results.

Yes, we see that too, and really, the research on expulsion says that if, if staff even think they're having a better communication relationship with the family, they are less likely to expel. So that connection is really important, and we do a lot of trying to get people to perspective take, you know, like, what might this be like? Let's step back a little bit like, what might this be like for this mom or this dad or this grandmother? Like, what might they be feeling? How might they be experiencing this situation? What's it like for the child,? And just if we can get a coach in there to help that connection with family, it doesn't always mean a child stays in the program. We just had an experience, but the experience was so different for that family because the staff were committed. The coach was committed. The parents felt communicated with. They had a plan for how they were going to make a change to a new program, so they weren't told, which we get these calls, Hi you're walking in the door, and here's your child's backpack. You can't come back. There was a partnership, and I think that's critical. So when I think about when you talked about listening like I think about developing the trust, so the parents will tell you you know what you might be missing, instead of just telling you what they think you want to hear. So obviously, if people know you're listening and you're going to act on it, that's key. Were there other things you think about when you think about what made parents comfortable to share? Here's my real input,

Yeah. Well, like I said, just really, you know, going deeper, there really cultivating that's the culture and climate in this place, in this space, before every parent started with us. I and let me say this, I had this brainstorm that I wanted to meet for an hour with every parent before they started. And later I was like, why did I say that, it takes so much time, but I stand by it, saying this is the type of center that you're walking into upfront, setting the stage so that when I picked up the phone and called, it wasn't like, oh my gosh, what happened, right? So I also made a practice of once a month, just randomly picking parents and as the director principal, saying, I have something to tell you about your child, right? So having the culture and climate of support so they're like, what's going on in my child's life? Yes, I wanted you to know I was in the classroom today, and Kelly worked really hard on this, and I just wanted you to know that. And they're like, okay, what else? and I'm like, that's it, right? Winning. Really, don't forget about the culture and climate. Don't forget about that part and use to put some time and effort in that too, way, way, way back in the day, way back in the day, some of the listeners will be like, I've never heard of that, but if you're a person of my age, you always heard about the three R's, reading, writing and arithmetic, right? They took the devil. There are three more R's, and the first one is relationship. That's the other, that's the new R. The second one is relevant. How do we make this relevant to today? And the third R is about academics. It's rigor, right? That's a different part. We're not necessarily talking about rigor right now, but thinking about the new three r's and that number one relationship, nothing trumps that. You have to start with that culture and climate and building the relationship from the beginning. Then you go to what structures and systems. That was a structure, that was a process that I implemented for myself as the leader. I said, I want to get to also know these families. I'm not only the director of the adults. I want the families to know that we are in this together, so that our meeting of here's what you can expect from me, and conversely, here's what I expect from you. We're going to come to together even when there's an issue, right? And we're going to talk about it, and we're going to be open about it, and honestly, if I if I have to, if I'm going to be honest, and I am, I said to parents at that moment, there will be times that I'm going to tiptoe into your parenting.

I love that.

Tiptoe into your parenting. I'm gonna say to you, we're gonna move away from corporal punishment even in your home, please. I'll tell you more about that, right? We'll help you through that, right? So some of the things that really we're afraid to talk about, but I let them know in that pre meeting, this is what we're about. We're going to honor and respect everybody. We're open. You hear, you get to be whoever you want to be.

I hear that co parenting piece in it, not that you are the parent. But like that tip, yes, you were have your precious child for, you know, eight hours of the day here, and we want to partner with you. In these ways, not just we're going to tell you what we're doing, and you're going to tell us what you're doing, but we're supporting this whole person here. So that care plan, I love that. Priscilla always says, instead of behavior plans, we should call them support plans, yeah? Like this is we're not, we're not trying to lay it at the child's feet. This is about us coming together.

Yeah, one thing that stands out as you're sharing, Dr Evans, you're modeling this as a leader in your school program. And I'm thinking about the leaders out there listening, and some of them may be better at showing their teams how things can change and may not, may not have all the words to articulate all these changes. But I'm thinking about how powerful it is for a team to see that commitment to I'm going to take those long hours and connect with each family. Because when you have a challenge that comes up, or if the family has a challenge that comes up, they're going to be so much more open to sharing some of those really intimate family things with their classroom staff, with their childcare provider, whether it's a family childcare but that is such a foundational piece. It's going back to that point you talked about, you know, it's just, it's critical, critical, yeah,.

When we were having those meetings where we were asking our groups of family, hey, how we're doing. I was going to the car saying, I've got a meeting coming up. I need you to be here. And then when we had those meetings after school, we provided free childcare. Because what are you going to do with your babies when you're meeting with me, right? We provided dinner. We made sure the kiddos, which they love, pizza, they just want something a little bit more adult friendly for adults, right? We were like, we don't want pizza, right? But we made sure that we created a place in a space where they don't have to think about childcare to give input to the school. We're taking care of that, and we weren't always just sending out surveys. We wanted you to come in. This is our house, our place, our space, ours, yours and ours. That's important too. Don't always just send the electronic thing. I know it's easier. I know it's more time, but to hear and sometimes to see the both joy. That's another thing, to see the joy on parents face when they're telling you what is working, yes, so sometimes to see the frustration about things that aren't, it hits you and it makes you say, let me do something different. Again, the culture and climate is for everybody. Is for the students, is for the adults. It's for your teachers and your staff. I also made a habit of every week I would go, in just five or 10 minutes, sit in the classroom. I would not interrupt the teachers, and I'd leave them a sticky note. I'd leave them a note that says, Wow, when you were with Jimmy, here's some magic that I saw, right? Or, Oh, I looked over on that shelf, and the way you have the materials for the students, beautiful. And what I discovered, which it wasn't really my intention, but, like, at the end of the year, or I had two or three teachers, like, here's a notebook I put all of Dr Evans's sticky notes in here. That's the culture and climate piece.

Well and it's the parallel, right? You're everyone, everyone, the children, the families, the staff, everyone feels seen and heard for who you are, that your unique strengths and what you bring to the community.

Yes, you've got to go to those three levers of transformation, personal and professional development, culture and climate, which is huge, and then your structures and systems, your policies, procedures. How am I getting there? How am I being intentional about this? Yes, we don't want anything to be on autopilot. I don't. I want to be intentional and massaging it and tweaking it and adding to it. Super, super excited about that piece.

Well, when we think about that sort of organizational structures and systems. For some reason, a question is coming to my mind that I think is important, one of the and it's about questions really, what are the questions we need to keep asking ourselves as organizations, to keep growing? Because I feel like this is just a continual path we're on, right?

Yes. So the question, some of the questions we want to say is, whose voices have we heard from? Whose voices have we not heard from? Are we creating a window and a mirror? Are we creating opportunities for people to look out of the window and see others who don't look like them or who have different experiences, but most importantly, particularly for children of color and folks of color, are we creating a mirror? Do they see themselves as this being their place in space? Do they see themselves in the curriculum, in the stories, in a positive way. One of the most poignant things that happened to me, and I'll share this story very quickly. I was doing a teacher observation, and it was a reading lesson, and so she had the children around her, and she said, we're going to read this story. And Kierra, I will never forget. Kiara, raised her hand and she said, she was a black girl in this fifth grade, she said, "Is this another one of those books where the child was orphaned and the mother died and the because I see it's a black family on the front of the book" like, right? It was all she was saying was that the books that had been read was always about people who look like her, who were in crisis. She was asking for that joy and that hope. And so as we're thinking about window and mirror, please think about joyful and hope, and also bringing your families in, bringing your families in to share their things, their celebrations, their culture. Bring them in so that they can see themselves and being honored and respected and celebrated right ?Again in one of our preschool classrooms in one of the Montessori and this is typical in in a lot of early childhood, a lot of counters, and where we would have bears and the counters. Well, one of the students, you know, was African American, and so some of the she had a tray of cowrie beads from Africa to be counters. How can you bring cultural items into your everyday learning that will have a child smile and say, we have these at my house?

Yeah, yeah. Well, thinking about that joy and the hope and this is a joyful and hopeful endeavor. Do you have any thoughts about how we can remember to celebrate?

Yeah, I think, you know, the celebration for me is about authenticity. That's why I said, if you have families who that is their culture, that is their identity, your first reach out. I mean, you are going to be in communication, where you're going to be having that, you know, creating that that bond, that home/school connection, is where you're saying, we're open.,come in and teach us, help us learn. Help us celebrate in the way that should be celebrated, right? Again, this is more adult than it is for early childhood. But just as a note, you know, people went around and said, What is Cinco de Mayo to you? And so many people had no clue what Cinco de Mayo was about, the celebration of the battle won. But people were oh, tacos and food and sombreros, and that's not really what it is. And so part of the celebration is honoring truth . At my school, we we were able to look at our calendar. We no longer, at that point, took Columbus Day Off. We decided we were not we were going to be in session because for indigenous families, that day is a day of mourning. It's not a day of celebration. The first Thanksgiving, as it used to be taught, I'm going to say, used to be taught, it was not accurate. And so, how do we celebrate with authenticity? And sometimes it's not warm and fuzzy, right? Sometimes we don't go as deep, because we're in early childhood, right? We may not go into the deepness of it. Here's what happened. We do, though, shy away from celebrating in a way that is inauthentic. I remember I was a first grade teacher, confession time, y'all, we made the Indian headdresses, the pilgrim hat. I did all of that. I cringe now, right?

Nicole, I was a parent who came in and said to the teacher who was going to do that, I had to sit down with her after school and say, my daughter, cannot participate in this activity, and we had to have a long conversation, yeah, but you know, she had created a space, even though we had different views on it, that I could come in and say to her, this is this is now comfortable for me. What else? What can we do differently? And she changed her practice,

Amazing. I wish somebody had, back when I was a classroom teacher in my beginning back in the 80s, nobody said that everybody was doing it right, and I didn't see myself as and I was an adult, had gone through college, right? And so again, creating the structure, the culture and the climate where those beautiful conversations can be happening, and we can say, let's disrupt, and we're going to disrupt in this way, right? Not necessarily taken to the streets, but we're going to change some things. We're going to disrupt. We're going to disrupt, you know, what we're feeling and what we're seeing and what we're choosing to do, yeah.

And then I think about, just as a closing thought, celebrating those changes we've made. Yes, yeah. I think teachers and early childhood educators, I'm thinking about family child care. Now, you know who do you have to celebrate? You celebrate with your families, maybe, you celebrate with your colleagues, other providers who you trust to talk about this, but finding opportunities to celebrate those little stuff just like we do with children, right? We celebrate those. We should do that for ourselves.

We should do that for ourselves and not, listen, this is what we know about this equity work. What we know is we will have some successes, we will have some hopes. We will have some hurdles. Yes, we will have some setbacks. We're gonna mess up sometimes, but giving ourselves the grace and learning from our mistakes. We say it to children all the time, but we don't do it for ourselves. That we learn from mistakes and owning and saying, you know what, we tried that it didn't work quite how we thought. So we're going back to the drawing board, and we're going to try again, not giving up having that hope and not always seeing ourselves as broken, needing to be fixed. One of my favorite quotes is this, instead of thinking what is wrong, how do we fix it? Try thinking what is possible. How do we create it? So creating a beautiful, different, transformative future.

That's a perfect note to end on.

Perfect note to end on. Thank you so much, Dr Nicole Evans, for being with us on this episode of Inclusion Matters. And Beth menninga, our coaching manager, and I'm excited to have a part two to this conversation. And we've, you know, we've, we've touched on so many exciting possibilities. I love that quote. And you know, CICC, we carry in hope. And this is a hopeful ending. This is a hopeful we have a hopeful future when we, when we have conversations about this. So thank you. Dr Nicole, thank you, Beth, looking forward to our next episode.

Thanks for listening. For more resources visit us at inclusivechildcare.org.