"We Were Marching for Our Equal Rights": Political Literacies in the Early Childhood Classroom

• In Event: Found in Translation: Connecting Reconceptualist Thinking With Contemporary Early Childhood Practices

Abstract

“None girls have been president. That’s not fair! We need a turn.”-Vanessa (Fall, 2016)
This paper examines the intricate development of political literacies within an early childhood setting. Through the re-presentation (Freire, 1970) and critical analysis of classroom narratives, we unveil the powerful minutiae of classroom talk, told and untold stories, the shape/shaping of dialogues, and the sanctioning of the political as “appropriate” and vital in the lives of young children through the lens of the U.S. 2016 election.
2016 was a year filled with feelings of empowerment and hate. U.S. presidential candidates Hillary Rodham Clinton and Donald J. Trump faced each other in a vicious campaign. Trump recurrently elicited misogyny, xenophobia, and racism. It was a campaign where it became necessary to declare that #BlackLivesMatter and to remind Americans that “women’s rights are human rights” (Clinton, 2012). Into this political climate these young children entered school. While not able to vote, they were part of a world and sociopolitical context in which these ideas circulated and where these discourses took root. This presentation examines a preschool classroom’s engagement in political literacies as they struggled to make meaning around the turmoil and aftermath of the 2016 U.S. election.
As political conversations wound their way through the children’s days at school, there were many what ifs and whys—what grown-ups call “critical questions” and “problematization.” The children engaged in authentic dialogue—learning from and with each other. Together, they problem solved and moved toward planning for action, embracing and enacting the inner works of the critical cycle inherent to culture circles (Souto-Manning, 2010) in their own way in their own context. Their dialogue was punctuated by comments signaling problem solving and situated action, regarding the fairness of girls needing a turn, work that needed to be done, and apocalyptic ideas of a bad president:
Jeremy: If the bad president wins, there will be explosions everywhere. Things will be all exploded and no more people. And the dinosaurs might come back.
Rajiv: But bad people can’t be presidents. That’s against the rules.
This space for rich questioning and conversation allowed the children to delve into their deep capacity for critical, political literacy. This practice recognizes the agency of children, how in reading their world, they are developing political literacy. Literacy is much more than “walking on words; it’s grasping the soul of them” (Freire, 1985, p. 19). After all, “the fundamental goal of dialogical teaching is to create a process of learning and knowing that invariably involves theorizing about the experiences shared in the dialogue process” (Macedo, 2000, p. 17).
In politically (re)positioning early literacies, which generate from the everyday experiences, concerns, and lives of young children and their teachers, we embrace meaning-making processes which name and problematize the flaws, in/equities, richness, complexity of human experiences. In doing so, we make visible the ways in which political literacies humanize early childhood education and (re)position young children as agents.

Authors

• Mariana Souto-Manning, Teachers College, Columbia University

• Dana Frantz Bentley, Buckingham, Browne, and Nichols School