(Re)Thinking anti-racist pedagogies in early childhood education: An exploratory case study of the perspectives of Muslim Mothers in Ontario
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This exploratory multiple case study explored Muslim mothers' perspectives and experiences in relation to their young children's education in Ontario, Canada. The study included seven cases, each being one Muslim mother of a child/children aged between 4 and 8. Data were collected through in-depth interviews with each participant mother and analyzed through a deductive and inductive thematic analysis. The five main deductive patterns discussed are home-school partnerships, sense of belonging, mothers’ conceptualization of education, the influence of media, and Islamophobia. The six inductive patterns discussed are fear as an emergent feeling, mothers as ambassadors, celebrations as a barrier, secular education, health education, and decolonizing the curriculum. Looking through the lens of anti-racist pedagogies and pedagogies of walking alongside parents, key findings include: from the mothers’ perspectives, educators’ biases and misconceptions about Islam contribute to feelings of fear and being judged; classroom curricula are lacking the necessary resources (including programmatic curricula) to include Muslim students’ funds of knowledge resulting in critical inclusions of Muslims and Islam in public schools being the null curriculum (Eisner, 1994); schools are not secular spaces due to the celebration of Eurocentric, Christian holidays and occasionally other holidays that coincide with Christian holidays (e.g., Hanukah during the Christmas season); classroom curricula privilege one religion over another; there are no equitable mechanisms for dealing with tensions in curricula. In large sum, weaving some of the inductive themes that emerged from the data, it was evident that the perpetuation of Eurocentric ideologies is part of the hidden curriculum. Hence, this study offers recommendations in three areas: 1) recommendations that can inform the early childhood classroom curriculum; 2) recommendations for early childhood educators directed towards anti-islamophobia; and 3) recommendations for intentional anti-racist family engagement in early childhood education. Future research may include exploring anti-racist pedagogies and pedagogies of walking alongside families in the early years’ classroom, examining the position of the educators and their conceptualization of the aforementioned pedagogies, and interrogating the lived curriculum in teacher preparation programs.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".