Beyond “Be Nice, Be Kind”: Moving From Helping-as-Compliance Toward Helping-as-Mutual-Aid in Early Childhood Classrooms

• In Event: Providing for Ourselves: Mutual Aid and Gift Economy Politics as Practice for Liberatory Education

Abstract

As U.S. universal early childhood education (ECE) extends school spaces to increasingly younger children, ECE replaces family as locations where children learn how to relate with themselves, others, and a constantly changing world (Heimer & Ramminger, 2019). Although children often know how to take care of each other (Soto & Swadener, 2002), this is commonly taught out of them through “social emotional learning” (SEL) curricula, rooted in capitalistic and neoliberal frameworks (Camangian & Cariaga, 2022). For example, common SEL curricula for ECE teach “helping” in ways that construct aid as charity, one-directional, and largely material. This reifies ableist interpersonal, institutional, and systemic ways of positioning people with disabilities as incapable recipients of charity who are deserving of pity and/or disposability as draws on society and communities (Russell, 2019).

Using a case study from a second grade classroom, this chapter argues for a move towards noticing, naming, and celebrating children’s intrinsic capacities and knowledge of mutual aid. Rooted in perspectives around disabilities studies in education, disability justice and care-work, we zoom in on a second grade class’ annual Egg Drop in order to showcase how children enacted mutual aid, moving beyond neoliberal and capitalistic constructions of mutual aid as solely financial and material giving. We invite ECEs to take up the language of mutual aid in order to root young children and their educational experiences in communal care, interdependence, and dreaming into being worlds where we all are able to be.

Authors

• María Cioe-Pena, University of Pennsylvania

• Jenna Cushing-Leubner, University of Wisconsin - Whitewater