Evaluating Impacts on Professional Practice

I would like to share a personal experience, where I experienced racism toward my oldest daughter when she first entered a daycare when she was 2 years old. We had just come from Mexico, and my daughter had never experienced being in a daycare center, nor speaking or hearing another language other than Spanish. I remember that the first impression I had from the center as I asked for information, was that it was a clean, well organized and child orientated center. Qualities that I was looking for, I also noticed that the teachers were very attentive and nurturing to the parents and children, so without hesitation we enrolled our child right away. After the second day we both my husband started to notice that my daughter was one of two children that spoke Spanish all the rest were either polish or white, and none of the teachers spoke Spanish, and they all were Caucasian. Then we noticed that our daughter was having a very hard time with separation and she would stay crying and when we would pick her up she was still crying. None of the teachers ever approached us to let us know how she was doing and what they have done to help her. The sad part of all of this, was that we were never acknowledged, we were never greeted when we dropped our child nor when we would pick her up it was as we were invisible and not important as other children and families from the center.  

When we asked how our daughter was doing the teacher answered “Well she cries mostly all day, and we really can’t comfort her, because we don’t speak Spanish and we can’t understand what she is saying. The teacher also mentioned that she would take her to the quiet area to give her some space, but she would stay there for most of the day, and refused to interact with anyone else. After hearing this, my impression was that they didn’t even try to help my child, and that they had a certain bias against Spanish speaking children, because of the distinctions both my husband and I observed. We both were disappointed to the point that we also adapted the same behavior towards the teachers, behavior that was not health for u or our child. We ended up taking our daughter out, after two weeks of invisibility. This experience affected the whole family,  in regards to our ability to trust in others ability to set aside their personal bias an actually do the work that needs to be done. It was until my daughter’s kindergarten teacher that we actually felt valued and respected, our language, culture and values we just as important as the rest of the families in her classroom. Until this day our 17 year old daughter still remembers her teacher and the many moments that we shared our food, stories and cultures with the rest of her class and teacher.

How important it is that as teachers we provide an environment were all children and families feel welcomed, were all feel just as valuable as any other, and were language, skin color, culture etc. do not affect the level of the quality of work we do with the children and their families.