“Glimmers of Hope”: Practitioners’ Perspectives of Racial Literacy with Young Children in England
Bath Spa University
How they used Delve
A researcher at Bath Spa University used Delve to organise the combined questionnaire and interview dataset for a thematic analysis of racial literacy in English early years settings, after coding the material manually and while explicitly reviewing and discarding any AI-suggested interpretation that departed from her own codes.
“Once the questionnaire and the interview data were combined and manually thematically coded by the researcher, a thematic analysis tool with Artificial Intelligence (AI) assistance was used to organise the dataset (Delve, 2024). No new AI-generated insights were adopted, and any perceived analysis or interpretation was checked and either considered or discarded by the researcher to remain consistent with the original codes.”
- Field
- Early childhood care and education / anti-racist practice
- Data
- An open-ended questionnaire circulated to roughly 40 early years practitioners in one ECEC setting and an Early Years Forum for Anti-Racist Practice, returning 10 responses, plus three in-depth semi-structured interviews with practitioners leading anti-racist practice across three different settings in the city
- Approach
- Interpretivist study using Braun and Clarke thematic analysis, inductive patterning combined with deductive coding through a critical race theory lens; the researcher coded manually first, then used the software to organise the combined dataset, with a simple discourse analysis layered on to read tacit meaning in word choice
- Data types
- Open-ended survey responses, Interviews
Abstract
After the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020, racial justice seems to have fallen back into performative racial liberalism. Racialised outcomes are evident in the Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) sector (0-5 years). However, the opportunity of these foundational years is often overlooked in its potential to help address these inequalities. This study aims to give practitioners a voice and explores the gap between theory, policy, and practice by seeking out the perspectives of ECEC Practitioners interacting with our youngest generation. By taking an interpretivist approach through open-ended interviews and questionnaires, this study seeks to understand the meaning practitioners make of racial literacy in anti-racist practice with young children and highlights the barriers and successes from the practitioners’ perspective. The image of a river emerged as depicting the upstream struggle of practitioners’ journey of anti-racist practice. The barriers are categorised as: fear, confidence, and Whiteness; time and capacity; and lack of guidance at the national and local policy levels. The successes experienced by the participants, or ‘glimmers of hope’, are heart knowledge; self-reflection; and the opportunity to reflect within a community. The potential of reflective communities emerges as critical in the purposeful and continuous excavation of racialised inequalities in pursuit of equity and racial justice.
Citation
Beth Wilkinson (2026). “Glimmers of Hope”: Practitioners’ Perspectives of Racial Literacy with Young Children in England. Research in Education Curriculum and Pedagogy Global Perspectives. https://doi.org/10.56395/thajh887