Uncovering Historical Bias in Early Childhood

The seemingly simple line of questions, “What do you see and how do you know?” has led to some of the deepest thinking and most engaging lessons with my 4s/K class across subjects. This week, as we prepare for the upcoming Presidential and Vice Presidential Inauguration, we used our observational skills to understand American history a little bit better.

To start, we looked at this greeting card illustrated by Christian Robinson.

What do you see? How do you know?

We agreed that we saw lots of faces with different expressions. Some students thought we were looking at babies because of the circular face shape and curly hair, while some thought we we were looking at older people because they had no hair! We noticed they had all sorts of different colors: hair, eyes, and skin.

Then, we looked at the following photo. What do you see? How do you know?

At first, we noticed how old some of the photos looked. Students saw that some images were entire black and white, some kind of reddish (sepia) and some even looked like paintings. Then, students began to notice that they all had similar light skin tones. I shared that they were looking at photos of every vice president up until now. Then, I shared with them this photo of Kamala Harris, the next vice president:

What do you see? How do you know?

As for my students, they suddenly realized there weren’t any women in the group of vice presidents. In this big group of people with power, we were seeing the very first woman and person with dark brown skin.

I asked them how they felt about it. Here were some things they said:

"It makes me feel very upset. What about all the other people?"

"It makes me feel mad, very mad. There have been no girls at all! And no people with darker brown skin! That's not fair!"

Next up, we will do some more thinking about why this pattern has gone on for so long and what we can do to work towards more fairness.