Start the Conversation

The spring of 2016 was a particularly tense time, and it didn’t surprise me that students were acting out in their play some of what they were hearing in the media or during conversations between adults at home. Young children often act out social issues in their play to make sense of them. Modern interpretations of developmental theory tell us that play is the key method that children use to understand their world (Jones & Reynolds, 2011). It came out later that the student who talked about a war had meant for it to literally be a race, which made me wonder if he hadn’t heard words like presidential race and White House and—picking up on a general sense of tension and conflict, especially around race—conflated terms.

In the aftermath of the event, families of color took a more proactive approach to addressing the issue than White families did. In response, the administration sent home an email describing how our teaching team had handled the incident: we held a community circle and addressed the dangers of targeted play and exclusion, reinforced the idea of allyship and safe play, and offered resources for parents to continue the discussion at home. The parents of the girls who had been chased, along with other parents of color, requested that the school schedule a mandatory meeting for all students’ parents and guardians to talk about what had happened and make sure it didn’t happen again. In contrast, several of the White parents did not feel the need for any further action. In fact, some said they had been too busy to read the email and felt assured that the school had handled it well.

The parents of the Black children involved in the incident were concerned that the White parents would not talk about the incident with their children at home and that the children who chased their kids would not understand how dangerous and problematic is this type of play. They feared that these families would retreat into a silence that would cause further harm to their children.

When racial incidents happen at your school, what can teachers do to facilitate conversations instead of staying silent? How can you support student understanding and growth, and how can you involve families in this learning in a way that will deepen understanding for all involved? Teachers should provide guidance for students to support them in moving through conflicts, and they should reach out to families in order to communicate about the incident and what the school will do to resolve it.

Provide Guidance for Students

Howard Stevenson (2014) suggests that teachers should teach students how to “read, recast, and resolve racially stressful social interactions” (p. 4) in order to support them in becoming racially literate. Let’s look at each step in more detail. 1. Read the conflict: Gather information from the students involved in the incident in order to understand what happened and consider each person’s perspective. » Allow students to share their version of the story—Have everyone involved tell you what happened, as you would with any conflict or problem between students. Ask general, information-gathering questions, such as, “Tell me about what happened,” rather than questions that tend to put students on the defensive, such as, “Why did you say that?” or “Why would you do that?” 2. Recast: Provide strategies to help reduce the stress. » Provide students tools to manage the stress—Help your students recast, or locate the stress in their bodies, and give them strategies to help reduce the stress. Stevenson (2014) offers a racial recasting skill that both children and adults can use: calculate, locate, communicate, breathe, and exhale. Teach your students how to calculate, on a number scale from 1 to 10, the stress they are feeling, locate where it is in their bodies, communicate what they are feeling, breathe, and exhale. Teach this strategy before any incidents occur to let your students know that these things will happen, and there are strategies they can use to manage them. 3. Resolve the conflict: Support the students and families involved in the event in resolving the conflict together. » Schedule a class meeting or facilitate a conversation—Decide if the incident warrants a class meeting or a facilitated conversation between the involved students. Emphasize the impact of the conflict, which could be hurt feelings due to teasing or exclusion, rather than the intent of the person who displayed the exclusionary behavior. This could sound like, “What we want to pay attention to is what happened as a result, and how we can