Kinderwelten
Anti-Bias Education with Young Children
National Dissemination Project

Meike doesn’t want to sit next to Joshua and says: “He’s black!”

Timo and Haldun think that women can’t be pirates and throw the female play figures from the pirate ship.

Jasmin and Lennart won’t let Mariam jump rope with them: “Go away, you’re too fat!”

These are sentences you might hear quite often from small children – also in the day-care centre. What do they mean? Are the children expressing prejudices? Should you address this? But how? Or might it be better to pretend that you haven’t heard?

In the educational work with small children prejudices are seldom an issue for discussion, often out of insecurity how to tackle the issue. Or, because of the wide spread belief that small children don’t have prejudices and that discussing differences with them would mean making children aware of prejudices and biases.

The project Kinderwelten bases its work on the premise that small children are aware of differences at a very early age. Even more, they notice that certain attributes are valued differently by the adults in their surrounding: as good and beautiful or as bad and not normal. And because children are active and creative they construct from their own observations and out of the messages they receive from their environment their very own notions and opinions about people. As these opinions always also encompass the devaluations and values, that are part of the society they grow up in, they represent something we call a pre-prejudice. These pre-prejudices are made up of wrong information about and distortions of reality and children will develop them even without direct contact to those people affected by their negative constructs. To avoid that these pre-prejudices develop to full fledged prejudices, children need competent adults: They must be able to recognize biased and stereotyped messages and know how to support children in encountering diversity and what you can do against unfair and discriminatory prejudices. This means, for example, to regularly check your own work and the materials in the day-care centre for biased and stereotype pictures of people – and then to make changes.

In the project Kinderwelten providers of day-care centres and their teams have committed themselves to creating a “culture of growing up”. The main objective of this culture is respect for diversity of family cultures and the decisive stance against exclusion and discrimination. Providers in Germany need to develop a profile that reacts to the needs of a modern immigration society that includes an anti-discrimination policy. The project supports providers of day-care centres in this challenging evolution.

Funded by the Bernard van Leer Foundation the project offers its project partners (the providers and their day-care centres) qualified support over a period of three years to develop the quality standards of the providing organisations and of the pedagogical practice in the attached day-care centres. Basis of this work is the contextual approach (“Situationsansatz) and the anti-bias approach. From Jagstfeld in the South-West over Jena, in the South-East, to Buxtehude in the North-West of Germany a total of thirteen providers in the federal states of Baden-Württemberg, Lower Saxony and Thuringia with 29 day-care centres are engaged and involved in the project. By building regional cooperations, establishing trans-national exchanges also on a European level, the project participants will contribute to the dissemination of the approach and support the evolution of a network that encompasses providers, day-care centres, institutions and initiatives focused on promoting equity and respect for diversity. The project started in October 2004 and will end in March 2008.

Download Project Proposal (PDF, 1,2MB)

Phone: +49 30 / 225032-28
Fax: +49 30 / 225032-35

mail to: koordination@kinderwelten.net
website: www.kinderwelten.net

Project Management: Petra Wagner
Project Coordination: Anke Krause and Serap Şıkcan