Janmohamed – same-sex families in ECE material

In my research study, I did three things. I looked at textbooks, course outlines, course readings, around how families were discussed in early childhood education. I also interviewed parents, and I did a random sampling of parents across Ontario, and I got a good sample from people in rural and northern Ontario, and, the other thing I did was, I did interviews and focus groups with Early Childhood Educators, I’ve done three different modes of data collection around this particular research question, around what is the experience.

Primarily the textbooks, I would say, that there’s a dominance of silence around this particular family construct. What I came to learn was, in many of the foundational textbooks that I looked at, and I looked at them, at four colleges in the Ontario system, based on where the parents contacted me from, and in those college programs, there was only one that actually offered a course around what they called “anti-bias curriculum”. But when I dug deeper, even within that course content, there was very little content in terms of same-sex parents. So, we are fairly well versed around talking about diversity, in terms of talking about immigrant status and second language issues, but not in terms of this slightly more difficult topic, I think, in terms of sexuality and sexual orientation, but the reality is that there are more and more parents who identify from the queer community that are having children in all kinds of combinations and permutations, and I think that that silence needs to be opened up, to have a conversation, so that when we exit Early Childhood Graduates, they’re just as comfortable working with children that come from families that are somewhat different from their own.

And in fact, what I found was that, in the smaller communities they were more comfortable asking questions than they were in the urban programs. The other thing I found was that in several examples, it was the first conversation those educators had ever had about the sexual orientation of parents, or, you know, the gender identity of children, and how that develops.