How White Educators can Boldly Teach about Race in Engaging Ways

Photo by Thomas Park on Unsplash.

The United States is rich in diversity but is facing continual racial disparity and growing political division – challenges which should be addressed right from the early years, according to academics.

Two professors in early years education are arguing that it has never been more important to teach children how to have compassionate conversations about race, and they argue that white teachers should not be complacent and leave these conversations to other educators. The authors of Unpacking Privilege in the Elementary Classroom: A Guide to Race and Inequity for White Teachers passionately call for change and seek to empower conversations about race in predominantly white classrooms.

Jacquelynne Boivin and Kevin McGowan acknowledge the challenges in navigating the curriculum in a turbulent political scene, but argue this makes the need for difficult yet effective unpacking of racial issues more pertinent.

Unpacking Privilege in the Elementary Classroom explores the racial landscape of the United States and offers a call to action: more white educators and students need to acknowledge and discuss racial disparity. Boivin promotes the idea that young white students in predominantly white classrooms must recognize their privilege and reflect on it to discover their role in promoting racial equity, and that the classroom is a perfectly safe place to begin that process.

She explains: “Students at low‑income schools and with student bodies consisting of minoritized races face stark educational drawbacks compared to students at predominantly white schools. With teachers who hold less experience, contending with lower academic achievement rates, students at these schools have less of a chance of graduating high school and going to college.”

Boivin encourages her readers to increase their self-awareness and offers practical, real-life strategies for engaging a predominantly white student population as a white educator in any subject area. Far from being an aspirational-only text, the author offers clear guidance to setting achievable goals towards antiracism.

Unpacking Privilege in the Elementary Classroom: A Guide to Race and Inequity for White Teachers promotes action specifically among the white educator and young white student populations, with the aim of transforming both future race conversations and the racial landscape in the United States.

“The problem of systemic racism and the resulting segregated public schools cannot be solved with one single action or by one single person,” she explains. “This takes entire generations of people over generations of time. While I am hopeful that such change will happen, the ideas presented in this book can help us in the meantime, while predominantly white schools are still commonly found in every state in the US.

“By working with the system that is in place, we can hope to change the system to be vastly different and integrated in the future.”