At the Intersection of Equity and Early Childhood Education: Q&A with Erikson Institute President Dr. Mariana Souto-Manning August 23, 2022

The first 1,800 days of every child’s life – the time from birth to kindergarten – is the most significant period of development in their lifetime. And for more than 50 years, Chicago’s Erikson Institute has focused on ensuring that as many children as possible have access to quality care and education during those first 1,800 days through a mix of innovative academic programs for educators, direct service in the community, applied research, and policy advocacy.

Responsible for stewarding the organization’s legacy and pushing it to continue breaking new ground in the early childhood education (ECE) sector is Dr. Mariana Souto-Manning, who joined Erikson Institute in September 2021 as its fifth president. A native of Brazil and a first-generation immigrant, Dr. Souto-Manning started her higher education journey in the U.S. at a community college before going on to earn a bachelor’s degree in Early Childhood Special Education, a master’s degree in Early Childhood Education, and a Ph.D. in Language Education from the University of Georgia.

Prior to joining Erikson Institute, Dr. Souto-Manning served as Professor of Early Childhood Education and Teacher Education at Teachers College, Columbia University – one of many academic appointments during her career. Long focused on issues of equity and justice in early childhood teaching and teacher education, Dr. Souto-Manning has published 11 books, authored more than 80 peer-reviewed articles, and received several distinguished research awards.

As Dr. Souto-Manning begins her second year at the helm of Erikson Institute, we sat down to discuss equity in early childhood learning and teaching, how the pandemic has impacted the ECE sector, and more.

IFF: A year into your tenure at Erikson Institute, what are you most proud of?

Dr. Souto-Manning: What I am most proud of is that we are diversifying the demographics of our faculty and employees, and that we are making concerted efforts to recruit, prepare, and retain teachers of color in Chicago’s most divested communities. We know in Illinois that 82 percent of teachers are white. We also know from large-scale research that it makes a huge difference in social and emotional development, academic outcomes, and disciplinary actions when kids have even one or two Black teachers before third grade. At Erikson Institute, we are moving toward funding teachers who are community members, who will go back to the community and teach for at least four years, at which point their tuition is forgiven.

We are launching the first triple certification master’s degree program in the state, which will certify teachers in early childhood education, special education, and bilingual education or English as a Second Language (ESL). This is a much needed and consequential innovation. When these specialties are fragmented, it can prevent kids from fully flourishing. One example is when English language learners or multilingual learners are misdiagnosed for speech and language support services because the quantitative section of a commonly employed assessment is not valid for multilingual kids. Someone with a special education degree, but not a multilingual learner degree, would not necessarily know that, and even though they have the best intentions for the child, they would still be applying a monolingual frame of reference to the assessment that does not enable them to understand the sophisticated communicative tools and resources that the child already has.

IFF: As you see it, what are the most important issues right now at the intersection of equity and ECE?

Dr. Souto-Manning: For so long, we have been focused on access. But now we know that access is not enough. In fact, research has shown that access to low-quality, culturally incongruent preschool can actually be detrimental to children’s development. The quality of early education and coordination with other systems – whether community supports with social services or the transition to school, to name a couple of examples – are the issues we should be focused on. It is not just about getting children in early childhood classrooms, but we should attend to what happens in these classrooms. At the same time, the unit of analysis and assessment to measure the effectiveness of early education should not be reduced to the academic skills of the individual child.

Reshaping early education as an investment in the development of children, and not a means to teach a discreet set of skills, requires a couple of major societal shifts. One of them has to do with electoral cycles. Because everything has to happen during short periods between elections, there needs to be political will to get from point A to point B, and it’s challenging at best to accomplish that in a political environment as fractured as the one in the United States.

The second challenge is that there is widespread misunderstanding about the responsibility of early education. If we know how much of a child’s brain develops primarily within their first 1,800 days, as a society, we should be investing early in our future citizens. Yet in the United States, early education continues to be an individual or family responsibility, and the access each family has to quality early education depends largely on their level of wealth and privilege. Earlier this year we launched a podcast series called 1,800 Days. The podcast hosts experts in the field and they create a timeline from the roots of early childcare to the flawed current education system.

Early childhood education is never going to be profitable, but it is an investment in the wellbeing of communities. To treat the root causes of gun violence and other inequities in communities, we should be attending to the social, emotional, mental health, and individual growth of young children.

IFF: How has the pandemic influenced early childhood learning and teaching? Have there been any personal learnings during this period that stand out?

Dr. Souto-Manning: A lot of people focus on the negatives, but I think that there have also been many positives. The pandemic has caused us to rethink the role of families within teaching. We have realized that some kids are a lot more comfortable learning within their homes. We have forged stronger intergenerational connections with families and community members. It’s reinforced the idea that we need to remain flexible and to really listen and learn and adapt to an ever-shifting environment, and that has powerful implications in terms of how we approach early childhood learning and teaching.

It has underscored the need for more generosity, the need to assume the best, and the need to build on strengths instead of focusing on deficits. Because at the end of the day, especially with teachers and social workers and other professionals working in early education, we want them to see the strengths of families and children and build on them.

The pandemic, and the turmoil that it has caused, has also brought to bear the need to better attend to mental health issues among professionals in the sector, because their wellbeing is key to quality instruction and quality clinical services.

IFF: Can you expand on the importance of focusing on the mental health of early childhood teachers and other professionals working in the sector to increase the quality of early childhood education?

Dr. Souto-Manning: One of the studies that I did in New York before joining Erikson Institute had to do with early childhood teachers’ mental health, looking at things like perceived stress, quality of life, and quality of sleep. Among the findings was that the level of stress that teachers of color in New York City schools were experiencing was comparable to emergency room physicians. And while those professionals are likely to access lots of supports and be widely recognized for their contributions to society, the same wasn’t true for teachers.

There may be surface-level attention paid to self-care among teachers, but that means little without reorganizing the systems that are causing stress. If we want teachers to stay in the profession, we need to attend to the secondary trauma that they are experiencing daily so that they don’t burn out, and so that they’re not then inflicting the trauma inadvertently onto children, families, and communities.

IFF: Switching gears slightly, your research has also focused on “common assumptions and seemingly neutral terms employed in the education of young children that veil racist ideas.” Can you share an example of that and how it influences children’s experiences and learning outcomes?

Dr. Souto-Manning: A lot of times we think that racism is something that we do to children, but we know from studies that as young as six months of age, children already respond with different emotions to people based on skin tones. They develop an association between darker colors and distress as well as lighter colors and comfort. An example of this association is that nurseries are often painted in pastel colors instead of dark colors. Another example comes from cartoons, books, and stories in which the bad guys or the monsters are of darker colors and the heroes are of lighter color.

Children, from the time that they are born, are reading the world, and they’re starting to understand some of the inequities in it. Because adults are often uncomfortable talking about race and racism, we instead let kids construct that own understanding of themselves and the world around them. For example, a child may ask, “Why is your hand brown? Is it dirty?” In many cases, an adult is going to try to silence that child in an effort to avoid discomfort or awkwardness, even though it is a real question the child is asking to try to better understand something they don’t inherently know.

Race is not the problem, but racism is, and without directly addressing questions like that with young children, they are subconsciously developing assumptions that then need to be undone. For children of color, we have a responsibility to foster a positive racial identity as they develop so that they are proud of who they are and don’t wish to be white. For white children, we need to help prevent them from developing an exaggerated sense of themselves and their place in the world based on seeing so many people in positions of power who look like them, which is at the very foundation of white supremacy. For all children, we need to be sure they understand that diversity is the norm, not the exception. It is never too early or too young to start this work. It is adults who are often unready or unwilling to have those conversations.

IFF: What connection do you make between the quality of the space where early childhood learning takes place and the quality of the educational experience as a whole? Do you consider that a matter of equity?

Dr. Souto-Manning: Absolutely. First, there is a fundamental need to be sure that children have a safe place to learn, where there is adequate lighting and learning materials, and where they’re not being poisoned with lead in the water or paint. That’s a baseline, and not addressing those factors is gambling with their futures during a period when so much of their brain development is occurring.

The accessibility of early childhood learning facilities is certainly a matter of equity. There are so many children who have identified disabilities who don’t have the opportunity to learn in a universally designed space that considers their needs from the outset, as opposed to a facility that has been tweaked around the margins after the fact.

We also need to make sure that we are not just attending to the classroom facility, but to the community resources that can be tapped into for children’s learning and development. There are often more opportunities for play-based learning outside in wealthier neighborhoods, which is also a matter of equity. So, it is important for investments in facilities to be matched by investments that benefit communities by fostering community resources, particularly in places where disinvestment has taken place.

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