Abstract

Everyone has prejudices – whether we are aware of them or not. We were not formally educated in what prejudices to have; we acquired them in infancy from others; whether they intended to pass them on to us or not. If we do not identify what our prejudices are, we will unconsciously, but inevitably, pass them on. This has extremely important implications for teachers.
Within the Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE) sector, the Anti-Bias Approach helps to identify prejudices and provides tools to prevent transmission to others. It also teaches children to protect themselves from prejudice and discrimination. The Anti-Bias Approach is the internationally recognised gold standard for implementing equality and diversity in ECCE. The Approach contains goals – four for children and four for adults – and offers suggestions on their implementation – both by modifying practitioners’ attitudes and behaviour and by modifying the classroom environment.
Social justice principles have driven the need to discover the most effective method to teach the Anti-Bias Approach to ECCE practitioners. Using the philosophical platform of Classical Pragmatism, this study has used a mixed methods comparative case study to investigate the effectiveness of two different pedagogies in terms of their effects on 32 participants and to discover the extent to which the Anti-Bias Approach has been turned from theory into practice (praxis). The results demonstrate clear and profound differences between the pedagogies in terms of subsequent implementation of the Anti-Bias Approach.
Mezirow’s Transformative Learning Theory was used as a theoretical framework to examine and analyse the qualitative data and demonstrate the differences between the two groups; the quantitative data being utilised as corroboration. Critical Pedagogy from Freire and Giroux was used throughout as a conceptual framework to show that the emancipation of ECCE practitioners takes time. This research has addressed the lacuna of empirical evidence and has demonstrated which pedagogy achieves praxis of the Anti-Bias Approach.