Teaching Race to Grade School Children: Ethnicity and Belonging

By Kate Feinberg Robins, PhD

In my blog post Addressing Race in Ballet and Capoeira, I discussed Find Your Center’s commitment to bringing race and social justice explicitly into our dance and capoeira classrooms. Here I share my experience doing this with my Children's Ballet class for 7-10 year-olds in early June. This is part of an ongoing effort to incorporate history and context into our dance and martial arts curricula. 
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Tips for Addressing Race & Social Equity with Grade School Children

• ​Make it relevant. Find the underlying emotions and experiences that children can relate to. Invite children to talk about their experiences, but don't insist if they don't want to.
• Draw on school knowledge. Ask open-ended questions about what your students have learned in school, and build on that knowledge in your conversation. 
• Use what children tell you, not what you assume. If a child shares their family history, identity, or experiences, then build on those to draw connections with the material you're teaching. Don't assume that a child or family identifies with a particular racial or ethnic group.
• ​Don't put anyone on the spot. You may have some children & families who have more personal experiences with racism than others. Don't make assumptions about their experiences,  and don't expect that those who have experienced racism directly will want to share. 
• Relate it to your subject matter. It's okay to get off topic when there's something that needs to be dealt with immediately. But the long-term goal of embedding racial equity in your curriculum requires figuring out how it relates to what you're already teaching.
• Make it your own. Leave out the questions and discussion points that are less interesting to you. Let your own and your students’ experiences and knowledge guide you.

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The Lesson Plan

Children's Ballet is a 60-minute live online class that I teach for 7-10 year-olds. The class follows a typical ballet format with floor warm-up, barre, and centre exercises. I incorporate history, context, and critical thinking in a variety of ways. In this class we watched the 6-minute video "Dance Theatre of Harlem: Arthur Mitchell Tribute" published in 2019. This lesson built on another one that I discuss in my post on History and Struggle.

Dance Theatre of Harlem: Arthur Mitchell Tribute

Learning Objectives

• Students will be able to appreciate the contributions of Arthur Mitchell and Dance Theatre of Harlem to American ballet.
• Students will be able to reflect on their own experiences of belonging and not belonging.

Introduction (Pre-Video)

• Has anyone every heard of a place called Harlem? Harlem is a neighborhood in New York City. Have you heard of New York City?
• Has anyone been to a big city like Seattle?

Insert here any big city that is close to your students.

• In big cities there are lots of different neighborhoods. Sometimes there are whole neighborhoods that are mostly just one ethnic group. 
• In our last class we talked about African Americans and European Americans and Mexican Americans. These are all different ethnic groups. They are groups of Americans who have common cultural roots. 
  
• An ethnic group might have a common language or a common way of speaking English. They might have common cultural practices, like religion or clothing or food or celebrations. They might look similar to each other.
• Even here in our small city of Pasco, we have parts of the city that are mostly Mexican American, where it's common for people to speak Mexican Spanish, wear Mexican cowboy boots, eat Mexican food, and celebrate quinceañ​eras. That's what downtown Pasco is like, where we used to have our classes before we moved everything online.

Give a local example that your students are likely to be familiar with.

• So Harlem is a neighborhood in New York City that is mostly African American. Most of the people who live there have African ancestry. That means that either they or their parents or grandparents or great-grandparents or someone in their family a long time ago came from the continent of Africa. Because they're African American, their families share common experiences. They also look similar to each other. Most have dark skin and would call themselves Black.
• This is a video about a ballet company that is called Dance Theatre of Harlem. It's based in this neighborhood called Harlem.
  
• The man who founded the company is Arthur Mitchell, and we're going to learn about him and why he started his ballet company.

 
Wrap-Up (Post-Video)

• ​Why do you think Mr. Mitchell left New York City Ballet to start a different company?

If students have a response to this question, make sure you acknowledge and discuss their ideas.

• Have you ever been in a situation where you felt uncomfortable?

One of my students described an experience where she had to give a speech onstage at school and everyone was staring at her and it made her feel uncomfortable.

• When Arthur Mitchell was dancing for New York City Ballet, he might have had that same feeling, like everyone was staring at him. Not because he was performing onstage--that was normal, it was his job. But he might have felt like everyone was staring at him because he looked different. In the video they showed that he looked different than the other dancers at New York City Ballet. He was the only one who was Black.
• He might have felt different than the other dancers too. Maybe he felt like he had to change the way he talked and the clothes he wore so that he could fit in.
• Even though he was one of the best dancers in the New York City Ballet, maybe he quit because he didn't feel comfortable there. 
• Maybe he wanted kids in Harlem, the neighborhood where he grew up, to be able to learn ballet without feeling uncomfortable--without feeling like everyone was looking at them because they looked different, and without feeling like they had to talk and act differently than what they were used to.
• Mr. Mitchell brought ballet to kids in his ethnic neighborhood, instead of bringing them out of their neighborhood into a place where they might not have felt as comfortable, like he had to do when he wanted to learn ballet.
• At Find Your Center, we did something similar. We taught our classes in downtown Pasco and in Spanish, so that it would be comfortable for the families who live in that part of town, instead of forcing them to go to another part of town where they might not feel as comfortable.

Pay attention to how your students respond to your words. Make sure to offer opportunities for your students to contribute their thoughts, and make sure to acknowledge and build on their comments.

• Does the Dance Theatre of Harlem look like a fun school? Maybe someday we can go visit. For now, let's take that fun energy and put it into our own dancing for the rest of class!

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Ethnicity and Belonging

I like this video because it's joyful and celebratory. It reminds me of the triumphs that come out of struggle, the strength and resilience of communities, and the power that each of has to create a vision and see it through. These reminders are important in moments when it feels like we're struggling against all odds. For children who may not be as aware of the broader issues our society is struggling with, this video offers inspiration for the great things they can accomplish, both as students and as they grow up and become professionals.

This video also offered opportunities for my students to draw connections with their own lives. It gave them a window into a professional ballet school, which helped them contextualize their own training at a recreational school and gain respect for the art of ballet. It allowed us to explore in more depth the concept of ethnicity, which I had introduced in the previous class. We were able to make connections with ethnic groups in our own city, and with personal experiences of belonging and not belonging, social comfort and discomfort.

This video brings up many complex issues that can be discussed with adults and teens as well. It's great for all age levels because there are many subtleties that can be addressed or left alone, depending on the age group.

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