“She had no idea that kind of thing was hurtful – they don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings,” Fink said of the third-grader who tugged at her eyes. Young students sometimes don’t realize what they’re saying or how painful a comment on the playground can be. The program is active in 25 states and offers training and lesson plans around family diversity, gender stereotyping and ending bullying.įink didn’t need help spotting right and wrong around racial diversity and gender bias, but training helped her find the words and tone to explain it to young children, especially when it came to matters of sexuality. Students of all races favor teacher diversity, and here's whyįink, who teaches at Pope Elementary in Puyallup, Washington, began anti-bias training with the Human Rights Campaign’s Welcoming Schools program two years ago and immediately began to share those lessons with her colleagues. Teacher with students in classroom Thinkstock But at schools around the country, learning about bias related to race, gender and sexuality is part of everyday teaching. Day, Holocaust remembrance week, Women’s History Month and countless others holidays and awareness weeks. Lessons have long been built around Martin Luther King Jr. Little insults and acts of disrespect once shrugged off or ignored – just kids being kids – are now treated in some schools as important chances to learn. Just as Fink learned to teach math and reading, she has practiced how to squelch unwitting bias and stereotyping before it has a chance to grow into bullying or racism.
It was a quick back-and-forth with a big lesson, but it came from a trained teacher who had rehearsed what to say. “Oh! I’m sorry!” she told her teacher, and they went back to their book. “I’m Asian,” she told the child, “and when you do that, it hurts my feelings.”
It was one of a thousand little conversations that fill each day in a third-grade classroom.Īs teacher Kimmie Fink read a book featuring a Japanese character, a student brought her fingers to her eyes and tugged on the edges, stretching them into narrow slits.įink stopped.
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