Celebrating Differences, Embracing Unity & Kindness: In 2025 and Beyond!

Workshop Description

How do we honor children’s voices when they ask about the racial and gender realities of injustice, immigration, climate change, and food insecurity, without traumatizing them with anxiety and fear? How do we support children in seeing themselves as activists and working to dismantle the inequities in their learning environment? How do we extend this support out into the community we serve?

In this 2-part series, educator and consultant Victor Bradley will provide examples from 30 years of experience working in early childhood on these crucial topics. Victor will provide materials, book ideas, slides, strategies, and tools to support educators in teaching about anti-bias topics in a developmentally appropriate way. There will be opportunities to ask your questions and learn techniques from each other to help you engage with confidence and professionalism in this vital anti-bias/anti-racist work with young children.

This training will be rooted in the 4 Core Goals of Anti-Bias Education by Louise Derman Sparks and Julie Olsen Edward:

Goal 1: Identity Teachers will nurture each child’s construction of knowledgeable, confident, individual personal and social identities. Children will demonstrate self-awareness, confidence, family pride, and positive social identities.

Goal 2: Diversity Teachers will promote each child's comfortable, empathetic interaction with people from diverse backgrounds. Children will express comfort and joy with human diversity, use accurate language for human differences, and form deep, caring connections across all dimensions of human diversity.

Goal 3: Justice Teachers will foster each child's capacity to critically identify bias and will nurture each child’s empathy for the hurt that bias causes. Children will increasingly recognize unfairness (injustice), have language to describe unfairness and understand that unfairness hurts.

Goal 4: Activism Teachers will cultivate each child's ability and confidence to stand up for oneself and for others in the face of bias. Children will demonstrate a sense of empowerment and skills to act, with others or alone, against prejudice and /or discriminatory actions.

About the Presenter

Victor Bradley (he/him) brings 30 years of experience teaching in early childhood classrooms, training, and consulting at schools, universities, conferences, and workshops, and holds a deep commitment to social justice. Victor has extensive experience and a high level of expertise in creating and implementing ECE curricula on history, via an anti-bias and anti-racist ideology, through play in outdoor and indoor classroom spaces. He has organized and led meetings for parents and various communities on different development topics, including children's literature, the neurodiverse child, change-makers, music and movement, mindfulness, social-emotional learning, biodiversity, and gender.

Victor has served as a faculty board member at an independent school and as a mentor for graduate and undergraduate student interns from various colleges and universities in the Boston area. He is now in a position to utilize all this hands-on knowledge and experience and offer it to others via his consulting work.

As an African American with Jewish heritage and as a bisexual male, Victor brings a unique perspective to his work. This has driven him to be a mentor in various settings, as diversity and inclusion are crucial in early childhood education.

In his spare time, Victor enjoys listening to a wide range of music, connecting with nature on walks on the beach or in woodland areas, cooking delicious vegan meals, and practicing the healing art of Reiki. These personal interests and experiences enrich Victor's professional life and perspectives. He also loves spending time with his 14-year-old daughter, Hazel, and partner Sabina.