“I’ll Tell You the Truth”: Listening to Children in Service of Worldbuilding

• In Event: Saturday Roundtable Session 9:45 am
  In Roundtable Session: Decolonizing Education in Vygotsky’s and Sociocultural Approaches: Developing Knowledge on the Ground (Table 18)

Abstract

Most education researchers agree that schools are cites of injustice and despair. Yet, while a constant barrage of (predominantly white) so-called experts offer reforms, we persistently ignore the group on the frontlines - children (Paley, 1986). To this effect, the field of developmental psychology is quite implicated, as children, particularly children of color, are largely understood as not fully human (Adams-Wiggins & Taylor-García, 2020). By contrast, this work takes seriously children’s ability as agentive worldbuilders who mediate conflict, develop theories, and evolve their praxis in community (Stetsenko, 2015). Rather than imposing the language of adults, I study the complex reality-imagination relationships of children’s play (Vygotsky, 2004). As such, I ask: what can educators and education researchers learn from the teaching-learning (what I call tearning) evident in children’s play and their reflections on their play? And, what becomes possible when these moments enter the teacher education classroom, not as opportunities for intervention, but as sacred encounters?

This work draws from abolitionist pedagogy (Rodríguez, 2010) and transformative ontology (Stetsenko, 2016) to extend our radical imaginations. Abolitionist pedagogy, while grounded in insurgency against Black chattel slavery in the United States, has expanded as “a positive project that focuses, in part, on building a society where it is possible to address harm without relying on structural forms of oppression or the violent systems” (Kaba, 2021, p. 2). While abolitionist pedagogy works to enact futures while learning from the past and present mistakes (Stein, 2021), transformative ontologies provide tools and theories for radical imagining (Stetsenko, 2016). Through these tools, including theories of childhood play and creativity (Vygotsky, 2004; Connery et al., 2010) and the singular process of teaching-learning (Stetsenko, 2009), I work to develop the capacity to engage meaningfully with abolitionist critiques of teacher education and K-12 schooling.

This study consisted of two parts. In the first, I reflect on an autoethnography using a recording of three children (two of which are my children) - ages 20 months, 5 ½ and 6 ½ - playing during a summer day camp. Weeks after, I played the recording for the children and we discussed their decisions. I then brought our collaborative theories, as well as the ethnographies themselves, to two groups of novice teachers - (1) an informal research group composed of four of my former students, myself and a Brazilian post-doctoral student, and (2) a teacher education class of 18 students in a large urban public university. The novice teachers and I further the analysis, and discuss the implications of tearning on larger educational systems, including achievement measures, teacher development and retention, disciplinary practices, and curricula.

The scholarly significance of this study is both theoretical and methodological. The children, novice teachers and I build upon abolitionist critiques and transformative ontologies, thus using our collective contexts to radically reimagine what is possible. Further, in bringing the insights of children into the teacher education classroom, I offer one provocation of how we might change pedagogical structures to support radical tearning.

Author

• Kushya Sugarman, Mount Holyoke College