Research shows that children as young as 6 months recognize race; that by age 2 they take race into account in decision making; and that by 5 years they prefer the white doll and, if exposed to white imagery of God, they prefer white leaders. The false narrative is already ingrained.

In January of 2022, a project to develop race-conscious children via conversations in early childhood programs (ages 3 - 6 years) was accepted into the U.Lab 2X Project Incubator program. A small core team with Reggio-Emilia inspired early childhood experience and a larger extended team embarked on a design process to gather stakeholder interviews from a diverse group of parents, educators and caregivers; use artistic processes to model the current and emerging systems and the key roles within them; utilize all this information to develop and prototype a series of engagements with children; and bring the process full circle by bringing together a new group of people to listen to the children's ideas and suggest new iterations to prototype.

In the beginning we were most excited about developing our framework for conversations with children; but as we went through the process we soon realized that the real work was taking place on our teams as we grappled with our own differences, learned to listen better to one another and to stakeholders, and stay at the table through disagreement and push-back to begin to create our own shared narrative. This session will present the adult process, and the children’s content.