Inclusion and Implicit Bias

Dr. Katie Herron from the Early Childhood Center interviews long-time preschool teacher and Research Associate, Lynne Hall, on implicit bias in the early childhood classroom.

Transcript

Welcome to the Early Childhood On-the-Go Podcast, where the Early Childhood Center team shares ideas and strategies for professionals and families.  Dream big, start early. Hey, hey, here we are back again in the podcast studio. I am here with Research Associate Lynne Hall and she's one of our regulars. She works here at the Early Childhood Center and I'm gonna let you hear from her about her background in just a minute, but we are talking about inclusion and implicit bias today and she's an expert on both. And so, our perfect guest for the podcast. Lynne, do you want to tell folks a little bit about your background? Yeah, that was quite the introduction, thanks, Katie. Yeah, thrilled to be here talking about, inclusion. It is one of those things that's really near and dear to my heart, that I believe strongly in. I spent probably a good 20 plus years teaching preschool in all kinds of different settings. And then I spent some time as a senior early childhood equity specialist and so happy to be back as a research associate at the Early Childhood Center sharing about this great information. Awesome. Well, let's get started with just defining our terms. I think that's always helpful. I have a feeling that most people have heard the word “inclusion” before, but I don't know that everyone gets to hear what we mean by it. And I have a feeling it might sound or look different to different people, depending on their experiences. So, when you talk about inclusion, what are you talking about? When we talk about inclusion specifically in early childhood spaces, we really mean giving all children that sense of belonging and membership with their peers, right? And I know that sometimes when people hear “inclusion,” they think, “Oh my gosh, how am I going to meet everyone's needs? And how am I going to make that work?”  We’ll talk about that, what that takes. But, you know, special education was never designed to be a place. It was designed to be a service to make sure that all children get what they need to be successful, right? And in our natural population, people with identified needs don't live in a separate world. They're not segregated from the rest of us. So, I think it's really important to start out from the very beginning, heading all children together and becoming friends, which is so important in early childhood, and learning those social skills that they're going to use their entire lives. And the bottom line is children can't benefit from instruction they don't receive. And there are some things that when children are educated in segregated settings, they don't have as many learning opportunities as they would in inclusive settings, and specifically thinking about that social- emotional aspect, which research has shown is really beneficial to children with and without IEPs.   And think about the learning opportunities that typical peers have when they're teaching things and showing things to students that may need a little more support. So, it really benefits both groups of children, but at its core, it's really about membership and belonging. Okay. Thank you. That was helpful. And I love the reference to research because we have a rich body of research that shows that this stuff works. So, when we talk about inclusion and building belonging in classrooms, what does it look like? So, if I were to walk into a classroom, or a school, how would I know if inclusion is happening? What would I see or what kinds of things, words, would be used? For inclusion to work well, it takes planning. It takes a system being intentional, but it can be done. And one of the first things that we like to talk about with inclusion is access. So, starting with what we know is Universal Design for Learning or people hear the term UDL, it makes sure that all children can access and most importantly meaningfully participate in the activities and the environment in the classroom. So, whether that's the physical environment so they can navigate the room, reach everything like typical developing peers, whether it's the temporal environment, we're making accommodations based on time and putting supports in place for children to understand what time means in a classroom setting and that social environment, what are we putting in place to make sure that all children are meaningfully engaged socially with their peers? And that's helpful for kids that don't have IEPs or disabilities as well, right? Because they all have strengths and weaknesses. That's the cool thing about inclusion. All of the things that I'm going to share that we put in place to make inclusion work is good for all kids. It's just being really intentional and meaningful about it and the chances are that a lot of people are doing these things, they may not know exactly what they're called. So, once we make sure that all children can access a setting and fully participate, then we want to put in these multiple tiers of support, both for academic growth and for social- emotional growth. So, what that means is there's all of the evidence-based practices that classroom practitioners are doing that benefit all kids all the time. So, all kids are getting the benefit of those practices. Then there's what we call Tier Two or targeted supports, and those are some things that practitioners put in place to help children that need a little extra help. Maybe it's an additional small group, maybe it's an additional activity, something like that. And then the Tier Three supports, which are things that teachers do to support children with additional individual needs. So, everybody is getting Tier One all the time. Some kids are getting Tier Two and Tier One, and a very few children are getting additional individualized Tier One supports. And it's not just children with identified special needs that need these different supports. It's all kids, right? And the nice thing about using this tiered approach is that children are going to flow in and out of tiers based on their needs and based on what content area they may need that additional support with. Yeah. The thing I love about UDL, and I know you're talking about tiered levels of support, but it makes me think about the jagged profile that we talk about often with Universal Design for Learning and just how everybody has different strengths and weaknesses. And so, you know, you might have a kiddo that needs a little bit more support in one area and less support in another and most kids are going to have those jagged profile of learnings.  You're absolutely right. What else? What else would we say? So, another really important thing again, especially with early childhood, is partnering with families. Families know their child best, they know what works, they know what doesn't work. And they need to be taught too some things that work at school that they can also practice at home for giving additional support. So, really partnering with your families and maximizing on their expertise is going to work to your benefit in an inclusive environment. Again, not new information. Something we do in general education classrooms too, also good practice in our inclusive settings. This is probably a big one -  professional collaboration. It's really having a team approach. So, when our general educators are collaborating with our special educators and with our therapy providers, and that can look a lot of different ways, but making sure that that professional collaboration is happening, and it's happening regularly and frequently. And then finally, and this ties into that professional collaboration piece because it does take time, is having an administration that is supportive of inclusion. So, they're willing to do what it takes to build the infrastructure for inclusion to be successful. I'd almost say that that's the foundation of all of the practices you just mentioned because if the leadership isn't on board, then it's very hard for an individual teacher to do these things because like you said, it takes time, sometimes it takes a little money and it works a lot better when everyone's on the same page. So, 100%, yeah. Let's move into another definition because the goal of today was to talk about inclusion and implicit bias and kind of how they weave together. Before we jump into how they connect, go ahead and define “implicit bias” for me. It’s another one of those terms that I have a feeling we've all heard and maybe a lot, but sometimes we forget what it actually means. Yeah, absolutely. So, when we think about implicit bias, another term for that is unconscious bias. The important takeaway is it's the bias that we're not aware of. We all have preferences, right? We all have affinities for certain things and those would be what we might call explicit biases. But the implicit biases are things that run really deep that oftentimes we don't know that we have them, and they can even conflict with what we say we believe. So, that's the tricky part about implicit bias. They're automatic. They're involuntary, and we just don't have the awareness of them. Yeah, I'll just share personally that I have been in the disability field ever since my son was born 22 years ago and I was aware of my implicit bias around some things, but when I took the implicit bias test that Harvard has that most of us have heard of around disability, I was shocked that I had biases there too, when I had spent the last two decades attempting to support my child, loving my child, all of those things, and there it was so yeah. And myself too, as a an early childhood equity specialist for some time, I took the race implicit bias quiz and was surprised that I still show some biases in that area. So, yeah, I mean, we all have it. It's just that that approach, in terms of when you know you have it, what do you do?  Talk a little bit about implicit bias and how it may get in the way of effective inclusion. What we need to remember about implicit bias is that it really comes from our upbringing and our experiences. Our implicit biases and even our explicit biases are really coming from that combination of our culture and our identity. And what they can do is really impact our interactions with others, the decisions that we make. When we think about how it's impacting children in an inclusive setting, it's going to manifest in a lot of different ways. I have a list here. We may not touch on all of them, but I wanted to share a couple of the hot topics here. Unequal treatment is the first one that comes to mind. For example, in education, teachers might unintentionally provide more attention and opportunities for students that they perceive as normal or more typical or similar to themselves, while inadvertently neglecting the needs of students that are with different abilities and backgrounds. And along those same lines, offering limited opportunities, so biases can result in limited opportunities for marginalized or under-represented groups, fewer chances for advancements, less access to resources and things like that. Well, I think that's really important because if we have teachers growing up, not seeing people with disabilities, for example, working in careers and jobs and things and why would they as teachers be thinking that that's the trajectory for those kiddos with disabilities that they may come across or have in their class?  That's just an important thing for us to think about. Yeah, absolutely. Another way that implicit bias can seep into our day-to-day work in the area of early education is missing the identification of needs. It can prevent providers from accurately identifying the needs and strengths of individuals who belong to different groups. It can also reduce that sense of belonging based on the interactions that we're having with children that we might identify as different from ourselves. Yeah. Well, so now here's where we get to blend these together. And the reason that we talked about doing this topic was because we were looking at a meta-analysis, and I'm not going to remember the authors off the top my head, but we were looking at a meta- analysis of all this research on inclusion and it showed that the real beauty of inclusion for kiddos that do not have disabilities is around their social-emotional development and growth. Yes, and their exposure to children with disabilities, then allows them to (we think) go on to be more comfortable and to have different assumptions and hopefully not have some of this implicit bias that we see and maybe the teachers and other folks in the system. I wanted to bring these two ideas together and think about how can we push back against implicit bias when we're talking about inclusion in schools? One of the things that we can do is start having these conversations, just like we're having today, right? Pointing it out, recognizing it exists, knowing that we all have it and that we don't have to hide from it, and talking about it. And the other really cool thing to know is that implicit bias is malleable. It can be changed. And providing an inclusive setting is one of the number one things research says can attribute to combating implicit bias based on the fact that you're going to form relationships with people that are different from you. When we think about that, maybe out of the educational context, it's really building friendships and professional relationships with people that are from different groups than we are. So, when we think about that in the early childhood space, children that are spending time with children that are different from themselves, they're not going to have those same implicit biases. And I think the same thing for the educators. They're going to break down any of those walls. I like that because for adults I think that's such a hard piece of advice, you know, “Hey, we're going to combat implicit bias by making friends with people who look different from us.”  Well, that's hard. It's hard to make friends as adults. But I'll tell you what, if we start with looking at inclusion in schools, I mean, it's easy to make friends in preschool. And so, we can get some of that going at a young age. I think it's amazing. There’s a couple of things just to keep in mind that the research tells us about combating implicit bias is to know when you're the most susceptible to it - which is when you have a heavy cognitive load or you're tired. So that's what 99% of the population has a lot of the time, right? We're tired and we got a lot going on, we're going to make those assumptions. You mean we're more likely. That's a good thing to keep in mind. And then again, we talked about having these types of conversations and get out there and make those new relationships. All right. I love it. Well, thank you. I don't think I've ever heard these two concepts talked about this way before. So, I'm kind of excited about it. If you all want to hear more or are interested, drop us a note on social media.  We're always happy to follow up or answer questions there. And in the meantime, thanks, Lynne for being here. Thanks for having me. All right. We'll see you next time. Okay.  Thanks for listening to the Early Childhood On-the-Go podcast from the Early Childhood Center team at Indiana University. Learn more at IIDC.Indiana.edu/ECC/