Playing with power: A guide for educators supporting anti-racist and decolonial childhoods

As part of project on ‘Diversity in Unity: Developing an anti-racist framework within Froebelian pedagogy’, Simon and I have produced this guide for educators working with young children.

First published in September 2024, the guide aims to support educators to understand how racial inequalities can emerge between children through play and how they can be challenged by educators. It is free to download and share.

This guide aims to help educators recognise and extend habits in children’s free play which embrace diversity and inclusivity – and consequently strengthen everyone’s learning and wellbeing. However Jones and Okun also highlight other habits, ones of resistance – everyday “antidotes” to colonial ways of seeing and being. Young children are experimenting with these too.

It challenges all of us to neither accept easy illusions of harmony nor to enforce “model citizenship” (for example by automatically directing children to include others or share resources). Instead, it encourages educators to skilfully bring difference into the open, attending to the creative tensions children are typically and healthily exploring – without trying to “fix” them – as they develop and negotiate their understandings of friendship, identity, power and the wider world. The guidance introduced here draws on the work of antiracist activists Tema Jones and Kenneth Okun. They look at how organisations and communities everywhere (not excluding nursery schools and early years settings) are shaped by longstanding habits historically normalised by colonialism. Even very young children mirror and play with these habits.

This guide and its reflexive activities help educators to recognise and transform these habits in children’s play. In turn it provides opportunities to make links with, and to transform, adult factors (in environments, policies or routines) which either promote or restrict your own capacity to notice and value difference.

https://www.froebel.org.uk/uploads/documents/Froebel-Trust-Playing-With-Power-September-2024-WEB.pdf