Playing With Childhood: How Attention to Children “Playing School” Supports Teachers’ Pedagogies of Refusal

• In Event: Children’s Pedagogies of Care: Listening, Planting, Sensing, Dignifying, Playing, and Kincrafting

Abstract

Too often, the voices of young children are absent from discussions of schooling. This erasure perpetuates colonial logics, as young teachers learn to ignore children’s needs, desires and experiences. As such, the purpose of my presentation is two-fold. First, I investigate what one example of playing school can teach us about the nuances of care in school. Second, I study how a critical conversation about that example allows a group of novice teachers to imagine school differently. Overall, I propose that attuning ourselves to children’s play is one way that educators and researchers can better understand the complexities of children’s care and build the capacity to enact anti-racist praxes.

This work builds from the nexus of pedagogies of refusal and critical childhood studies. Rooted in Indigenous, Black and trans*+ scholarship, pedagogies of refusal illuminate and interrupt harmful educational structures, while generating more humanizing practices (Tuck & Yang, 2014; Rodríguez, 2019). Similarly, critical childhood studies seek to unsettle popular narratives of “innocent childhoods” that reinforce the objectification of children (Luttrell, 2020, Nxumalo, 2021). Taken together, these perspectives hold the potential to delegitimize the hierarchies between professor and student, and teacher and children, thus repositioning both prospective teachers (PTs) and children as knowledge producers and care-givers.

As both participatory design research and (auto)ethnography, this presentation centers around the first meeting of The People’s Teacher Education (TPTE) - a research/support group, composed of three education master students, a Brazilian post-doctoral research student and myself (a PhD student). The presentation discusses TPTE’s collective analysis of a scene of two children (ages 5 ½ and 18 months) playing school in their home, and how the scene (and others like it) might be used to deepen anti-racist praxis in K-12 and teacher education.

The data will be multimodal and interactive. I plan to play the audio recording of the two children playing school and give the audience the opportunity to reflect on what they have learned from the children. Once I share transcripts from the research groups’ initial analysis, I will reveal the context, that the 5 ½ year old experienced a Black kindergarten boy being removed from her class. Finally, through an analysis of transcripts and fieldnotes, I will describe how this understanding shifted the research groups’ understanding of schooling’s carceral nexus (Sabatí et al., 2021), how the children experience and enact care, and how teachers might support communities of care.

The contributions of this presentation are methodological, practical and theoretical. Our discussion suggests that engaging with children’s play, especially through an anti-racist lens, allowed TPTE to (re)consider assemblages of school, particularly the monoculture of school, loss in the classroom and the role of children as carers across communities. We found that children experience carcerality at multiple levels, and they use play to understand and develop their own agency as caregivers (Stetsenko, 2015). Attention to these processes allowed our research group to gesture towards more humanizing pedagogies.

Author

• Kushya Sugarman, Mount Holyoke College