The role of Black Early Childhood Educators in childcare: On the urgency of addressing systemic anti-Black racism in the field of Early Childhood Education and Care


Janelle Brady, Toronto Metropolitan University; Georgiana Mathurin, Toronto Metropolitan University; Aruschga Mohantharajah, Toronto Metropolitan University; Rachel Berman, Toronto Metropolitan University

Ontario is the only province in Canada to have a regulatory body for Early Childhood Education (ECE) under the College of ECEs (CECE), established in 2007, where workers are registered (College of Early Childhood Educators, 2023). Further, Canada has created the Canada-Wide Early Learning and Child Care program, which will realize universal $10/day childcare by 2026 (Government of Canada, 2024). ECEs work in a range of early years settings such as licensed and unlicensed childcare, home-based, school settings, and family day programs. Despite these federal changes and professionalization in the field undertaken in 2007, ECEs are underprotected in many scenarios when it comes to wages and working conditions, with few exceptions in fully unionized environments (Association of Early Childhood Educators Ontario, 2017; Powell and Ferns, 2023). Given this, combined with the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been a mass exodus from front-line childcare work, as well as less people entering the field (Powell and Ferns, 2023; Powell et al., 2021). Once in the field, systemic barriers are laid bare for Black ECEs who are given fewer opportunities for advancement and promotions (Vickerson, 2023), and who face microaggressions as a symptom of anti-Black racism. Black ECEs not only face these barriers, but witness such unfair conditions imparted on the Black children and families with whom they work alongside in their practice. There are numerous egregious accounts of Black children being more harshly disciplined than their white peers, which is what has led to what some are calling the pre-school-prison pipeline (Bryan, 2020). As such, Black ECEs often take up the mantle in many cases to protect Black children, going above and beyond their job requirements (Grant, 2023). Anti-black racism in the workplace is well-documented and is coming to light across sectors, such as with the Black Class Action federal lawsuit; however, what sets apart Black ECEs is they not only face systemic racism, but they also navigate such inequities being imparted to the children whom they work with, causing a double level of harm. The field of early childhood education and care (ECEC) has embedded assumptions of childhood innocence - that children are too young to learn about race or racism - which leads to colour-blind approaches (Berman et al., 2017; Boutte et al., 2011), ultimately further disenfranchising Black children. Policies and programs also fail to adequately address anti-Black racism in the field. In a recent scan of guiding documents such as How Does Learning Happen (2014), a pedagogical tool developed by the Ministry of Education along with other leading documents in the field, there is no mention of ‘Black’, ‘Blackness’, or ‘anti-Black racism’; instead Black and racialized experience is often collapsed to ‘culture’ which perpetuates further harm by not explicitly naming race or racism. This presentation is part of a larger study, Honouring Black Refusals, which gathers the lived experiences and counterstories of Black Elders, Black ECEs, and Black Mothers. Based on 10 semi-structured interviews, the presenters employ Black Feminisms and Critical Race Theory to explore the system navigation strategies, working conditions, and commitment to creating pro-Black classrooms of Black ECEs, which not only support Black children and families, but all communities from intersectional identities. In all, the presenters highlight the need to not only address wage inequities, but also to layer these with pro-Black intersectional analyses of power to better support entry and retention in the field.

This paper will be presented at the following session: