Dolls for equity: foregrounding children’s voices in learning respect and unlearning unfairness

Prejudice often gets in the way of people living together equitably. Learning to see and work with young children’s prejudices and biases is critical in working for equity in the 21st century. Bringing children’s “knowings” about cultural diversity to the fore is essential to this task. Children’s words and silences can challenge us to think more deeply about how they come to know about cultural diversity and about the connections between these “knowings”, bias, and building respectful early childhood communities. This paper explores these connections and how they can be used as a starting point for equity education with preschoolers, using data collected in 62 interviews with Australian preschoolers.