Anti-Bias Curriculum in Early Childhood: A Teacher's Guide

In an early childhood setting, anti-bias education is a named framework, and its four core goals — Identity, Diversity, Justice and Activism — come from the anti-bias education work of Derman-Sparks and Olsen Edwards.

The goals give a teaching team a shared vocabulary for work that otherwise stays scattered: children noticing skin color, asking why some families look different, testing who is allowed into a game.

The name undersells the scope.

The goals attach to everything a room already does — arrivals, mealtimes, dramatic play, storytime, the way you answer a hard question — rather than to one weekly unit, and they run inside whatever your program uses: a published curriculum, emergent planning, or a theme calendar.

The lens travels with the teacher, not the product.

The profession frames the same commitment more broadly.

NAEYC's Developmentally Appropriate Practice position statement, published in 2020, says each child from birth through age 8 has the right to equitable learning opportunities in centers, family child care homes or schools — anti-bias education is one way a preschool teacher acts on that in the room.

For how the models and approaches a center can choose from change the teaching job, the preschool curriculum models overview compares them, and the preschool teacher career guide maps the role itself.

The framework's four core goals are Identity, Diversity, Justice and Activism.

Here is how each goal translates into a preschool room — and none of them works as a unit you teach once and tick off.

They are commitments you practice in both directions at once.

• Identity. Children building a confident sense of who they are and who their people are. In the room, this looks like children seeing their own lives reflected and named, and a teacher who notices how each child describes themselves — and who does not ask one child to stand in for a whole group.
• Diversity. Children getting comfortable, curious and respectful about human difference — skin color, home languages, family structures, bodies and disabilities. In practice, that means handing children precise, respectful words for what they observe, instead of a hush that teaches them the topic is unspeakable.
• Justice. Children learning to notice unfairness and exclusion and to name it. When a child announces that someone cannot play because of how they look or talk, the goal treats it as teachable rather than as noise to shut down.
• Activism. Children and teachers acting on fairness in small, real ways — a child speaking up for a left-out classmate, a teacher examining their own defaults and raising what they find with the team.

The Justice goal is a preschool concern, not a distant one.

Data from the Education Department's Office for Civil Rights, cited in a 2016 ACF memo, showed African-American boys were 19% of preschool enrollment but 45% of preschoolers suspended — a gap that keeps this goal's daily questions (whose behavior gets read as defiance, who gets left out of the game) on a preschool teacher's agenda, not in a distant policy debate.

Day-to-day discipline systems are the classroom management strategies page's territory; this framework asks what those systems should be fair to.

The goals land through work you are already planning.

Read back over a month of themes, studies and read-alouds and ask whose families appear in them — a theme calendar can run for months without any child's actual home life showing up in it.

Children's own homes, languages and traditions are curriculum content, and the preschool lesson plans page walks the planning cycle you would thread them into.

As much of the practice happens in the moment as on the plan.

Children ask about difference in the ordinary run of a day — why is his skin brown, why does her grandma talk that way, how come he has two dads — and each of those comments is a chance to hand over accurate, respectful words.

Answer briefly and factually; a deflection can read to a child as a signal that the topic is off-limits.

When teasing or exclusion starts, stop it and teach through it rather than only stopping it.

For practice with home languages in particular, the dual language learners guide goes deep.

The goals also point at the adult.

Anti-bias work includes noticing your own defaults — which children you call on first, which behavior you read as defiance, which families you make assumptions about — because your responses are part of what children watch and copy in the room, whatever you meant to teach.

And it includes families: invite family knowledge into the room, and where a family's view differs from the program's approach, your director sets the policy and the conversation runs through them.

Materials are the quiet half of the practice: what sits on your shelves and walls tells children whose lives belong in the room before anyone says a word.

This section is about what materials show, not how the room is arranged — zones, traffic paths and sightlines belong to the classroom setup page.

The anti-bias question is narrower: look at each shelf and ask who is represented, and who is missing from this specific room.

Run the question across the categories you already stock.

Books: who leads the stories, who appears in them, and whether a child in your current group could find a family like theirs anywhere in the pile.

Dramatic play: props that let children replay their own homes, languages and neighborhoods.

Art: materials that let a child mix the skin tones and hair textures they actually see.

Dolls, puzzles, games and figures: a range of people rather than one default.

And photos: the children and families enrolled now, refreshed as enrollment changes.

Two habits keep the shelves honest.

Spread representation across the whole year and the whole room instead of parking it in one diversity week or one display, and re-audit whenever the group changes — the answer to who is represented should match the children actually enrolled, not a generic picture of diversity.

Interviews are a fair place to ask how a program handles all of this: whether anti-bias goals are written into its curriculum decisions, and how the team picks materials.

And when you browse preschool teacher jobs, postings that name an approach — anti-bias, emergent, play-based — are telling you how the program thinks, so ask what it looks like on a Tuesday.