Writing historical wrongs: Why Black children deserve the joy of pro-Black play-based learning.


Kerry-Ann Escayg, University of Nebraska- Omaha

A variety of play-based learning approaches continue to receive institutional support in early years learning spaces managed by public and private organizations. Even as scholars urgently critique play-based learning methods in the early years by identifying the theoretical underpinnings of such pedagogies as Eurocentric (Kinard et al., 2021) and more specifically, how these approaches negate the salience of race and racism in the lives of Black children (Escayg, 2021,2022), we advocate instead for the adoption of both critical anti-racist and pro-Black play-based pedagogies in praxis. Indeed, when applied effectively, the preceding formative strategies may sustain Black children’s positive racial identities while promoting the joy-filled and psychologically safe early learning environments so critical to Black children’s well-being in the US and Canada.  Additionally, narratives of the enslaved—based on data culled from interviews with survivors of the slave trade for the 1936 to 1938 Federal Writers’ Project (for example)—proffer historically and sociologically rich lessons congruent with the current scholarly gestures toward an examination of how and to what extent the “white gaze” and whiteness, in general, inform Black children’s experiences in play-based environments. Most notably, although enslaved Black children engaged in play activities, such was often performed against a backdrop of control, surveillance, and physical and psychological violence (Harris, 2021). The foregrounding of the narratives of the enslaved ultimately brings current developments in pedagogical scholarship into sharper focus, making the case for this presentation as an act of temporal justice. Through the incorporation of storytelling formats and a creative approach that privileges Black children’s voices past and present, the proposed presentation recommends a broadly pro-Black pedagogy to address the historical wrongs and contemporary anti-Black racism that pervade social systems and often deny Black children’s sense of self (thereby thwarting opportunities for them to thrive in the early years of childhood). In this presentation, I will discuss the defining features of pro-Black play-based learning and provide practical classroom examples. Clarified by the transformative power of joy, hope, and resistance, such curricular components would be useful for researchers and practitioners committed to disrupting anti-Black racism in the early years classroom while safeguarding the youngest hearts and souls of our children as they learn to navigate racialized and increasingly hostile learning spaces overshadowed by the specter of a brutal, inhumane, and unjust past.

This paper will be presented at the following session: