Activity 1.2 | Intersectionality and privilege

To begin this activity, spend a moment reflecting on your own child care as a community. 

Would you say the term, “Beloved Community” reflects your child care’s values? And, what does the term “Beloved Community” mean to you?

Rukia Monique Rogers (2023) insists,“Our work was not to place [protest] signs in their hands at two-years of age, but to notice the ways in which they’re eager to be in relationship with each other and to reflect that, to offer that back to them” (11:03). 

• In what ways do you see children, families, and colleagues extending care, empathy, and illuminating our interconnectedness?
• How can you share these stories, and how can you invite a larger dialogue with your learning community by starting with the gifts that children bring?

In this course, we continue to hold duality, seeking new ways to understand ourselves and one another. We reject binary understandings of leadership that insist we have to be either firm or weak. Instead, we look to the gifts that early childhood educators bring, and we look at this incredible responsibility to change, to change systems, and to change ourselves and our relationships within these systems.

Childcare managers and leaders require humility. We have to acknowledge that we are stepping toward an uncertain future. We seek change in the name of co-creating futures in which human rights are upheld for all, regardless of race, age, ability, gender, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, nationality, language, or presentation. This is a world unlike the one we were born into, and the world we inhabit today. We acknowledge that it requires not only love and compassion, but fierce courage.

• Rukia Monique Rogers shares that leaders within the Highlander School commit to year-long inquiries guided by a “Declaration of Intent”. As a child care manager and leader, what question can you carry forward from this course, and into your practice, that will support your ongoing ability to see and respond to the needs of the citizens in your child care, and in your community?

We can create a pedagogy that honours that citizenship, that honours their voice, that honours their kinship with each other and this earth. And it requires love. It requires care, but it requires a lot more than that. It requires us to stand up and take fierce action, to question every decision that we make within a classroom, to question the choices and who holds power. Whose voices are missing from our space (Rogers, 2023, 48:02)?

• What questions will you bring forward from this course to lead your ongoing professional growth and ethical accountability?

Capture your reflections in your journal.