Activity 2.1 | Examining and Identifying Social Location
| Site: | RRU Open Educational Resources |
| Course: | Relational Leadership |
| Book: | Activity 2.1 | Examining and Identifying Social Location |
| Printed by: | Guest user |
| Date: | Tuesday, 13 May 2025, 5:48 PM |
Social Location and Identity
Activity 2.1 | Examining and Identifying Social Location
As an Early Childhood Education (ECE) leader, your social location and identity are pivotal in shaping your perspectives, interactions, and leadership practices. Social location encompasses the unique combination of factors, such as culture, race, gender, socioeconomic status, ability, and more, influencing your lived experiences and how you relate to others.
By reflecting on your own identity and gaining a deeper understanding of the identities of those around you, you can foster more inclusive, equitable, and compassionate leadership practices.
This activity asks you to explore key concepts, reflect on your personal experiences, and consider the broader impact of identity and social location in your role as an ECE leader through engaging with relevant readings, videos and reflective prompts.
You are encouraged to take your time as you engage in this activity. Exercises in critical self-reflection and self-disclosure can, at times, be distressing. Please be gentle with yourself as you enter this activity and seek any additional support as needed.Social Location and Identity
Exploring Blogs and Readings on Social Location and IdentityTo deepen your understanding of social location and identity, this section provides a curated selection of blogs and readings that offer diverse perspectives and insights. These resources, written by experts and practitioners in the field, highlight the complexities of identity and its impact on leadership, relationships, and early childhood education practices.
As you engage with these materials, reflect on how the ideas presented connect to your experiences and consider their relevance to your work as an ECE leader. These readings will challenge you to think critically and empathetically about the role of identity in shaping inclusive and responsive leadership.
Firstly, a 2021 School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences (SAFS) Washington University Blog, the concept of "social location", highlights the importance of educators reflecting on their social identities and how these affect their relationships with students. It also suggests sharing social locations can foster vulnerability and connection, helping to bridge differences and create a more inclusive environment.
Next, in the chapter entitled Enacting Twenty-First-Century Early Childhood Education: Curriculum as Caring(Hodgins et al., 2021), the authors focus on "the potential that a feminist materialism reconceptualization of care holds in efforts to unsettle Euro-Western developmental and anthropocentric hegemony and reimagine pedagogies for and with twenty-first-century children" (p. 204).
Finally, First Nations Pedagogy Online has created a multimodal resource to help you explore interconnection, a central core of First Nations, Inuit, and Metis worldviews and ways of knowing. Access the First Nations Pedagogy Interconnectedness page to access relevant readings, visual downloads, models and videos that situate interconnection and examine how we relate to ourselves, each other and our world.
References
First Nations Pedagogy Online (n.d.). Interconnectedness. CC-BY.
Hodgins, D., Yazbeck, S., & Wapenaar, K. (2021). Enacting twenty-first-century early childhood education: Curriculum as caring. In Curriculum in early childhood education: Re-examined, rediscovered, renewed(pp. 203–225).
University of Washington School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences. (2021, July 23). Social location [Blog post]. SAFS DEI Blog. https://sites.uw.edu/safs-dei/2021/07/23/social-location/Power, Privilege and Oppression
Take time to watch the University of Denver's Graduate School of Social Work openly licensed YouTube video below, "Power, Privilege and Oppression," and consider the relevance to your personal and professional life as you watch. Capture any reflections that arise in your journal.Reference
University of Denver Graduate School of Social Work. (2018, March). Power, privilege and oppression [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTDikx-maoM
Bronfenbrenner's Ecological Systems: 5 Forces Impacting Our Lives
In 1964, most people thought that the reason people ended up poor was a matter of biology and had little to do with the environment in which they grew up.
Urie Bronfenbrenner, a psychologist, helped us understand that a child’s environment also matters and the impact of the interrelationships of forces on our lives.
Watch Sprouts (2021) YouTube video "Bronfenbrenner's Ecological Systems: 5 Forces Impacting Our Lives" to deeply consider interrelationships, your identity and social location.
Reference
Sprouts. (2021, December). Bronfenbrenner's ecological systems: 5 forces impacting our lives [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6pUQ4EDHeQ&t=1s
Reflective Activity
Having engaged with the readings and videos on Social Location and Identity, take a moment to reflect on the various aspects of your own identity and social location.
Write down as many aspects of your identity and social location as possible. Which aspects of your identity and social location feel most visible or significant to you, and which feel less visible or overlooked? Why do you think this is the case? Why does this matter?
Take your time with this. Exercises in critical self-reflection and self-disclosure can, at times, be distressing. Please be gentle with yourself as you enter this activity and seek any additional support as needed.
Digging Deeper into Aspects
Now that you have identified various aspects of your identity and social location select three to five (3-5) core aspects that you feel most significantly shape who you are.
Reflect on your personality's key traits, the values most important to you, and the factors that influence how you think, act, and interact with others.
Write down or draw out your discoveries to capture your thoughts in a meaningful way. You do not have to share these insights, but you are encouraged to consider sharing them with a trusted peer to open up a dialogue about identity and social location.
Considering Others Identity and Social Location
Exploring the Identities and Social Locations of Others
In this next part of the activity, you will shift your focus to consider the identities and social locations of others and reflect on your perceptions and biases. This exploration is an opportunity to deepen your understanding of how identity shapes interactions and relationships in your personal and professional life.
You will reflect on which identities or social locations are most and least visible to you, explore why some identities may feel invisible or overlooked, and critically examine how privilege and marginalization within your own social location influence your leadership practices.
Click on each title to uncover a reflective prompt designed to help you explore how the identities and social locations of others influence your role and practices as an ECE leader.
Return to the previous pages with readings and videos to revisit the resources while completing this activity as needed.
Revisiting and Expanding Your Understanding of Social Location
Revisiting and Expanding Your Understanding of Social Location
In this final reflective activity, you will revisit your initial reflections to explore how your understanding of social location has grown and shifted after engaging with the provided resources.
Revist and re-read all the answers and artifacts you provided by answering these reflective questions:
- Do you want to add or reconsider anything from your previous answers?
- Did your initial responses surprise you? Why or why not?
- How do you now see your social location affecting and influencing your dispositions and practices as a leader in ECE? In what specific ways?
- What aspects of your leadership style would you like to rethink based on your new understanding of social location? Why or why not?
Take time to answer these questions thoughtfully, considering the impact of your social location on how you lead and interact with others.
This reflection will support you in integrating these insights into your continuous growth as an inclusive and relational leader in ECE. Be sure to save and revisit your reflections as a valuable reference, helping you deepen your understanding and build on this learning throughout your leadership journey.
Now that you have taken time to reflect on Social Location and how it continuously affects your standpoints (how you see, move, react, and respond in and to the world), you will move into activity 2.2, where examples of Leadership Models will be helpful to bring more specific breadth, depth, and inspiration to your personal, contextualized leadership model.