Transformative Justice in Early Childhood and Elementary Social Studies

• In Event: Anti-Oppressive Social Studies: Pursuing Justice Through an Ethic of Incommensurability

Abstract

While social studies education purports to develop democratic citizens, curriculum rarely acknowledges ways in which the nation has “systematically violated people’s rights, enslaved or expropriated people of color, or legally considered women to be second class citizens” (Epstein, 2009, p. 8). As social studies has become increasingly absent from early childhood and elementary spaces (Halvorsen, 2013), young learners have scant opportunities to learn about social studies that don’t reinforce the status quo. This paper describes a transformative justice framework that examines how social studies education might be reimagined to disrupt the exclusionary master narratives that permeate textbooks and popular culture to instead value and center the histories, experiences, and ways of knowing of Indigenous, Black, and People of Color (IBPOC), particularly at the early childhood and elementary levels.
Five disciplines within social studies are commonly taught to young learners: civics, history, geography, economics, and sociology. Each of these disciplines reifies nation-state master narratives that uphold white supremacy and Protestant, middle-class, cisgender, ableist, and heteropatriarchal norms; erase Indigenous sovereignty; champion meritocracy, individualism, and capitalism; depict the U.S. as a global leader of ever-increasing progress and equality; and minimize reflection on the opaqueness of power. Drawing from Winn’s (in press) five pedagogical stances toward transformative justice in education, this conceptual framework outlines the traditional approaches of these five disciplines and explores how shifting toward a transformative justice approach might allow educators to reimagine how each is taught.
For example, the sociological approach to social studies most often manifests through individual and cultural differences in early childhood and elementary classrooms. Common instructional themes throughout these early years include “All About Me,” families, neighborhoods, and communities, all typically taught through white, middle class, Christian, abled, cisgender, and heterosexual norms (Tschida & Buchanan, 2017; Van Horn & Hawkman, 2018). Social studies standards often evade explicit mention of race or racial groups, using coded language such as “culture” or “human characteristics” rather than naming specific ethnoracial minorities (Vickery et al., 2015).
A transformative justice approach to sociology would note that, for minoritized populations, family often extends to communal care networks that have little to do with biological structures and would reframe family photo-sharing projects accordingly (Templeton, 2020). Such an approach also recognizes how family tree creation can pose challenges to families for whom histories of enslavement or genocide make generational tracing and specificity impossible, while also failing to allow space for same-sex parents or adoption by presuming heteronormativity and conceptualizing family relations as (only) biological. Lastly, this approach disrupts units about community helpers by attending to the realities of racial profiling and police brutality and acknowledging how communities of color are disproportionately impacted (Love & Bradley, 2015). Rather than centering compliance, educators could identify a range of community members beyond public servants and highlight how they support and uplift each other.
As explored briefly through the example of sociology, a transformative justice framework of social studies deliberately centers the often marginalized histories and ways of knowing of IBPOC and is especially needed with our youngest learners.

Author

• Noreen Naseem Rodriguez, University of Colorado - Boulder