Picture Courtesy: I’m Glad I’m a Boy! I’m Glad I’m a Girl!
The stereotypes we find in all kinds of books for children that perpetuate various kinds of biases surrounding gender/class/caste/religion etc, which the children mimic as part of learned behavior.
The many ways in which we realize the education we receive does not account for the challenges children face in their everyday cultural contexts, equipping them with neither critical thinking nor emotional reasoning.
How children learn to discriminate based on identity, and perpetuate teasing, bullying and other forms of aggression towards one another, as early as age four.
By an environment that limits imagination. Books and media for children repeatedly reinforce certain narratives which constrict children to thinking in boxes and categories.
What do we see?
The problems are not uniform.
We cannot preempt the ways in which gender intersects class, religion and other holders of identity in different locations/spaces of learning/classrooms.
There is no one solution. But we can make an effort to interrupt various kinds of prejudice we face and reduce its strong hold.
How are we grappling with overcoming biases and stereotypes?
Fiction: Currently, we have 5 books in our repository that are centered around different topics of prejudice for age groups 6 - 8.
Collaterals: We are working on a repository of content/activities for a facilitator/teacher to conduct discussions related to the content covered in the books. The collaterals are available for some of the books including The Big book of Why and Don’t pull my cheeks.
What next?
Collaboration: We hope to open conversations around the themes of prejudice, education and culture. We are looking for collaborations with classrooms and teachers this year. Reach out to us and tell us more!
Feedback: We invite educators to use our material and provide us constructive feedback so that we can keep iterating/evolving and together build a strong framework for interrupting prejudice.
