DeCarla Burton remembers the day when her four-year-old daughter returned from daycare, saddened with the question: ‘Mommy, am I Black like a skillet?’

“The teacher was talking about skin tones…but the kids got the wrong idea; made her feel inferior instead of beautiful, like she is,” Burton said.

Pulling out a skillet and placing her daughter’s hand next to it, Burton explained that she was “beautifully brown,” and even so, Black, like a skillet, is nothing to be ashamed of. “Black is beautiful,” she said. “We all are.”

That moment stayed with Burton.

Since then, the daycare owner and child care educator has spent more than two decades training teachers and caregivers to infuse children with a sense of joy and appreciation for Black culture.

Continually seeking information on Black history and the Black experience, Burton joined a cohort of 15 early childhood educators who spent 9 months working with the Erikson Institute to develop teaching materials that weave African and African American history into school curricula for young learners ages 3 to 7.

The “Tracing Lineages: Pro-Black Early Childhood Curriculum Development Fellowship,” enlisted educators like Burton to use primary-source artifacts from the Library of Congress to develop teaching plans that explore the lineages, stories, and oral histories of the Black community.

Hosted by Erikson, a Near North Side graduate school focused on early childhood education and development, the fellowship was funded by a grant from the Library of Congress Teaching with Primary Sources Midwest Region Program.

By the end of the course, the fellows had developed curricula that promote essential skills in early education, including inquiry, analysis and critical thinking, according to project director Meghan Green, an assistant professor in Erikson’s teacher education program.

Last week, the fellows presented their culturally sustainable materials that center Black community histories and lineages for young learners ages 3-7. Many connected digitized sources from the Library, along with engagement with local community members, to provide young learners with micro- and macro-level views of important historical events.

The fellows who teach in a variety of early learning settings hail from counties around the state. Their curriculum unit plans are available for public use on Erikson’s website.

Featured work focused on topics such as: Black inventors; the Great Migration; clothing and the stories it tells; the Pollard family in the 1880s, who became the first Black family to reside in Rogers Park; leadership, activism, architecture, and construction; representation; and empowerment.

For preschool teacher Chelsea VanHorn, being a part of the cohort meant developing a lesson plan for her 20 students, all 4- and 5-year-olds, at Brightpoint Child and Family Center in Carpentersville – an “important age for social/emotional development and developing their sense of self,” she said.

Her unit focused on African American artists throughout history, including sculptor Edmonia Lewis, quilt artist Faith Ringgold, first known Black female tattoo artist Jacci Gresham, and multidisciplinary artist Nicki Warren, among others.

VanHorn used the Library of Congress website to locate pictures of artists’ work, then shared her discoveries with the children during Black History Month in order to talk about how they can express themselves through different mediums.

She then invited Warren to the classroom to conduct an oral history interview with the kids, who recreated the artists’ works in their own way, learning to tell their story through art as they did.

“We have a ‘question of the day,’ and I connected the artists and art we were learning about, and asked them how the paintings made them feel, ” VahHorn said.

Now, she wants to scale the work by involving more of the local community in future lesson plans. She hopes to incorporate folks like local business owners into what they’re learning in the classroom to bring diversity and culture into her teaching units.

Burton’s curriculum focused on Dr. Daniel Hale Williams, a Black surgeon. In 1893, Williams performed the first documented successful open-heart surgery in the U.S. Williams founded Chicago’s Provident Hospital, the first hospital in the U.S. managed by and for African Americans.

She taught broad values that Williams, or “Dr. Dan,” represented and shared with the students – equality, bravery, kindness, and curiosity.

Burton brought in a stethoscope, a scale, and a thermometer so that children could use the numbers for a math activity and demystify doctors’ visits. By the end of the learning unit, Burton said growth in the children could be seen as their vocabularies expanded to using words such as thermometer, blood pressure and punctured.

“Introducing them to people that look like them…I feel that creating this environment, especially for African American children that may not know a lot about their history, plants the seeds really quick,” Burton said. “When I go to other communities and see how proud they are, I want our people and our kids to feel the same way.”

With warmer temperatures, gardening beckons. Burton said she is moving to teach her kids about George Washington Carver, the famous agricultural scientist whose work focused on economic independence for farmers and agricultural sustainability.

The fellowship, Green attests, is a response to the need for developmentally appropriate teaching material, particularly in early education, around race, identity, and history. Her view is supported by the 2021 findings of the Black History Curriculum task force created by the Illinois State Board of Education.

Green hails from a long line of educators who taught in southern Louisiana in the ’30s and ’40s, pre-Brown vs. Board of Education, she said. That heritage was the inspiration for this work.

During segregation, “If it wasn’t in the curriculum and we or the community felt that it was important, teachers would create it,” Green said. “If it’s not there for us, we make it.”

Green is shifting to measure the impact and sustainability of the work regarding children’s racial identity development.

“I got teachers of multiple racial identities who serve children of various racial and ethnic identities, that was important to showcase,” Green said. “If we’re talking about the importance of Black history, it isn’t just important for Black children’s racial identity development. It’s important across the gamut.”