The Civic Ecology of an Early Childhood Classroom

• In Event: Civic Collaborative Learning Spaces: Reimagining the Civic Across Disciplines and Contexts

Abstract

Purpose:
Public schools are touted as ideal spaces for civic education because of the inherent diversity people bring together (e.g., Parker, 2005). Scholars often consider political diversity in secondary classrooms (e.g., Hess & McAvoy, 2014). How diverse experiences impact civic education in early childhood is less clear. This paper examines the civic ecology of a single Head Start classroom and argues that when adults recognize children’s range of civic capabilities enacted within a classroom’s constellation of relationships, early childhood classrooms can be ideal civic spaces.

Perspectives:
Children are citizens now (Project Zero, 2015; Lister, 2008) and their civic actions have real meaning for them and for society. To see children’s learning and embodied civicness, this study draws on sociocultural theories of learning and development (e.g., Rogoff & Mejía-Arauz, 2022) that highlight children’s learning as embodied, collective, participatory, and ingenious (Rosado-May et al., 2020). Communal participatory views of citizenship (Knight & Watson, 2014) center relational learning and knowledge as mediated across contexts, i.e. outside the boundaries of a single nation-state’s legal citizenship parameters.

Methods:
This paper draws from a larger video-cued ethnography (see Tobin et al., 2013) that asked, “How do young children act civically in the everyday setting of a U.S. preschool classroom?” This paper examines one general education Head Start classroom with Latine and Black students, located in the urban South.

Data Sources:
This paper draws on 163 hours of ethnographic observations, including field notes, photographs, short videos, and informal interviews, as well as three full-day films. Data analysis occurred throughout collection leading to initial codes; in the second phase of analysis and code refinement, all ethnographic data and full-day film logs were coded using Dedoose.

Findings:
Children act civically in multiple ways. The larger study details nine forms of civic action (e.g., advocating) that children do in their everyday classroom setting. This paper looks at the ecology of one classroom to highlight how children enact those civic action variations; their membership in the classroom community and relationships allowed children to expand their civicness. Individual students tended toward particular civic capabilities; however, in the collaborative space they constantly bumped into other possibilities of how to act civically. For example, Diamond frequently engaged in noticing/responding, problem-solving, and advocacy, leading to teachers deeming her the “third teacher.” Liliana tended toward including others as her primary civic action. From an ecological perspective, both children contributed to the civicness of the classroom space and created opportunities to see and interact with varied ways of being civic. This paper analyzes multiple scenes of civic action to highlight how the classroom context afforded space for children’s civicness to flourish in relation to one another.

Significance:
Young children, particularly children of color are often denied high quality civic education and are the subject of over-regulation in school. The ecology of children’s everyday civicness pushes back on unjust schooling practices that limit children’s agency (see Adair & Colegrove, 2021) as well creates opportunities to imagine more inclusive, just ways of being in community.

Authors

• Katherina A. Payne, University of Texas at Austin

• Shubhi Sachdeva, San Francisco State University