Beyond ‘Days After’: A Working Paper Examining Elementary Children’s Response to the 2021 Insurrection at the Capitol

• In Event: Excellence in Education Research: Early Career Scholars and Their Work

Abstract

Beyond ‘Days After’: A Working Paper Examining Elementary Children’s Response to the 2021 Insurrection at the Capitol

In our tenuous political moment, there remains a need for more research examining how children develop preferences, affiliations, and civic participation habits and, especially, how children perceive and make sense of social issues or events. Drawing on qualitative data generated in a multi-sited case study, this working paper zooms in on one 4th-grade classroom in the Midwestern US to examine how children and their teachers discussed the 2021 insurrection at the US Capitol. Using a critical literacies approach, the author traces how the seasoned classroom teacher (with support from a student-teacher) facilitated a discussion on the day after the Capitol event. In doing so, the author calls attention to how the class’s prior conversations about the intersection of power and race on earlier days in the academic year informed the children’s responses. Ultimately, this working paper’s findings challenge current conceptualizations about what it means to teach ‘on days after’ by emphasizing the possibilities presented if a critical literacies perspective is cultivated on all the days before.

Author

• Cassie J. Brownell, University of Toronto