Peace begins with me – Exploring identity in early childhood

Andrea Strachan, K1 Head of Grade and Catherine Malone, K1 Curriculum Coordinator, Dover Campus
10 August 2021

This has been an extraordinary year for the world due to COVID-19. Traditionally, each grade level at UWCSEA has connected with community-based voluntary welfare organisations throughout Singapore as part of our College’s commitment to place-based learning. Place-based education aims to connect a student’s learning to the communities and the world around them. At UWCSEA, our programme of immersive place-based learning means that each year our students have myriad opportunities to engage with and experience Singapore’s rich heritage, diverse cultures and unique landscapes, and that they use this real-life knowledge and experience as a foundation for their study of subjects across our curriculum. In previous years, K1 has partnered with Child@Street 11 in their service learning. A Singapore community preschool that serves children from disadvantaged backgrounds, UWCSEA students from across the College have been visiting the centre for almost 20 years.

When reviewing our K1 Unit of Study focused on Service this year, we began to realise that this component of our place-based learning programme, built around hosting the students of Child@Street11 for a series of visits to our school, could not be delivered as it had been in the past, due to COVID-19 constraints. We realised that a switch to an online format might not be as powerful, as the children would not have the opportunity to engage with others “in person”, and the teachers at Child@Street 11 agreed. With challenge, however, comes opportunity.

The past year has also highlighted for us the need to be more proactive in terms of speaking about, teaching about, learning about, and taking action regarding issues of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI). Educators and parents have searched for the right things to say and do as the world has emotionally processed ongoing acts of systemic racial injustice. As an internationally-minded community of learners, UWCSEA embarked on a journey of both reflection and action in terms of how we are addressing these important issues. An example of how our reflection has resulted in action was the introduction of a K1 language survey for parents to complete prior to the start of school, so as to provide us with more nuanced information on the linguistic profiles of the children coming into our care and classrooms. As educators, we used this information to find new ways of bringing home languages into the classroom, which included deliberately creating language buddies within our classrooms as we created K1 class groups, to support both a feeling of belonging and the development of literacy skills.

The K1 team re-evaluated our Service Unit of Study, taking the opportunity to consider other ways in which we begin to develop an understanding of “service” that would be meaningful and relevant to our youngest learners in the context of our pandemic-prescribed world. In collaboration with members of the DEI Pod, we decided to develop a pilot Unit of Study framed under the theme of “Peacebuilding”, focusing on the idea that “Peace Begins With Me”. The concept of peace-building, one of the ‘mission competencies’ outlined in our new College guiding statements, understands that peace can’t be achieved without knowing how to appreciate and engage with diversity, and that without understanding how to interact and negotiate with others, it is impossible to engage in meaningful service.

We started this Unit of Study by helping students to further explore the concept of “identity”, focusing on what makes us the “same” and what makes us “different”. We worked with Primary School Librarian Pamela Males to curate a collection of books that connected to our DEI topics of diversity, inclusion, identity and belonging. In K1, DEI learning often begins with an appreciation of diversity, celebrating the different people in the room. This is followed by a focus on inclusion, ensuring everyone in the room feels like they belong. Finally, we explore equity by examining the structures we put in place to ensure that diversity and inclusion happen.
The intention was for this Unit of Study to lay the framework in which our K1 students can begin to better understand how to be open-minded and inclusive members of our community, happy and well within themselves, so that they are better ready and able to engage in service to others.

As a K1 Team, we feel that we have only just started to scratch the surface in terms of uncovering new teaching and learning resources connected to issues of DEI that we had not previously been familiar with. This year, we held more deliberate and specific conversations with students about topics of culture, language and race that we had not engaged in before with our youngest learners. We took the opportunity to gently explore how we might engage students in discussion and celebration of physical differences, by challenging ourselves as educators to identify activities which could introduce concepts for discussion in age-appropriate ways. For example, we decided to challenge the oft-quoted assertion that young children don’t see colour. As demonstrated in the now famous ‘doll test’ (first conducted by researchers in the USA in the 1940’s) young children do see colour—and are already internalising messages about colour, many of which come from the structures and systems around them. Applying a UWCSEA context, in one lesson the K1 children were invited to dress felt dolls. They were provided with five different shades of skin tone dolls from which to choose. All of the students chose the lightest skin tone for their doll. To adapt the lesson, we then removed the lightest skin tones from the options. Rather than choose one of the darker tones, some children asked, “Where are all of the light ones?” Moreover, we also noticed that children were not choosing the dolls that most accurately matched their own skin tones, in favour of lighter ones.

This provided us with an opportunity to talk to the children specifically about skin tone and draw attention to our physical differences and the many ways in which we are each special. We read stories that celebrated different skin tones and included more physical diversity in the characters. We provided the students with pictures of themselves and their classmates so that they could make note of their hair colour, eye colour, skin tone and ensured appropriate colouring tools were on hand that would allow them to represent this in their drawings.

This Unit of Study has excited us as a teaching and learning community and we have been awarded a UWCSEA 50th Anniversary Innovation Grant to support this important work. We are looking forward to further curating and developing additional resources focused on exploring issues of DEI with young children that can be shared within our College community, and beyond.

UWCSEA 50th anniversary innovation grants

These programmes, selected for their potential to result in significant gains for our learners, will be piloted during next school year and shared at the UWCSEA Forum in April 2022. Our aim is to encourage development of innovative, scalable practice aligned with the UWCSEA Strategy, and to look for opportunities to extend their reach via strategic partnerships within and beyond the College.

2021/2022 projects include:

• facilitate a technology solution to provide access to music for our Singapore-based service partners to improve client wellbeing
• curation of developmentally appropriate DEI resources for Infant School classrooms and students
• development of a Dover-East Virtual Reality portal in the campus libraries
• Ready Learner One Alumni Project connecting our alumni network with existing students
• prototyping innovative learning spaces that serve introverted and extroverted learners
• broaden opportunities to participate in mathematics by diversifying community activities and focus beyond competitions

Subscribe and explore more on the DEI web page in Our Big Ideas!