Cultivating a Critical Curriculum Through Children's Literature: Examining Young Children's Conversations About Race and Equity

• In Event: The Moral Implications of Critically Ambitious Social Studies Instruction

Abstract

In this presentation, we detail how an early childhood teacher used picturebooks to launch conversations about race and equity in an integrated social studies/literacy unit. Drawing on data generated in a larger case study (Dyson & Genishi, 2005) in spring 2017, we provide two analytic snapshots of young children engaging in critical literacy conversations (Vasquez, 2004/2014). In turn, we use the third-grade children’s commentary to make connections to present-day global issues, including COVID-19 and the persistence of anti-Blackness. Understanding teaching and learning as value-laden tasks, we highlight the ubiquity of politics in classrooms and argue there exists an ethical imperative for incorporating social issues into curriculum across the lifespan.

Situated in an urban Michigan school, Author2 used ethnographic methods (Emerson, Fretz, & Shaw, 2011) to examine children’s engagement as civic actors related to contemporary GOP Administration policies. Over the nine months of the 2016-2017 academic year, Author2 engaged the 22 children in multiple, semi-structured interviews (Gubrium & Holstein, 2001) and audio-/video-recorded daily lessons on the four days Author I visited the school site each week. Additionally, Author2 collected lesson artifacts produced by the teacher and children. Working with Author2, Author1 transcribed the daily lesson recordings and, in turn, read across the transcripts to identify salient themes (Miles, Huberman, & Saldaña, 2014). Importantly, both here and in the analysis of data from the larger study, we bridged scholarship from social studies (Halvrosen, 2017) and literacy (Vasquez, Janks, & Comber, 2019) to develop a frame with which to ‘read’ the data.

Zeroing in on two whole-group discussions, we focus our presentation on the curricular possibilities afforded by grounding lessons in children’s informational texts and historical fiction. For instance, children read about Hurricane Katrina’s impact on communities along the Gulf Coast and critically considered the devastating losses suffered, including how Black communities were disproportionately affected. Just as Katrina very much exposed inequities across racial lines, so has COVID-19 as Black communities are unequally impacted. However, as summer protests across the globe have demonstrated, such inequities (and related reforms) are rooted historically.

Our second snapshot centers children’s consideration of racist notions like segregation alongside Black activism. Children connected contemporary protests of GOP policies to Black children’s protesting in the 1960s. For example, one white boy asked: “I wonder if a white person walked down the street...like a whole bunch of white people...if the policemen would arrest the white people for marching?” In reading this historical fiction text, as with the informational picture book, children were more than capable of critically discussing race and inequity. In this presentation, we also connected children’s comments to current questions about the convergence of Whiteness and anti-Blackness following George Floyd’s murder.

Given the persistence of anti-Blackness and its ramifications, our study’s findings are critically important insofar as we enhance current conceptualizations about whether and how young children can engage in conversations about systemic issues. This work is imperative in this moment, particularly as the U.S. once again looks to build back better in the wake of COVID-19 and sustained anti-Blackness.

Authors

• Anam Rashid, OISE/University of Toronto

• Cassie J. Brownell, University of Toronto