"I Was Playing Good": Exploring How Young Children Seek Community and Belonging at School

• In Event: Research in Progress Roundtable Session 3
  In Invited Roundtable: Early Childhood Education: Development, Curriculum, Digital Play, and Sense of Belonging (Table 4)

Abstract

In this dissertation study in progress, the ways that young children interact with each other, their teachers, and other materialities of their classroom and curriculum, are examined using ethnographic methods and a critical childhoods framework. The specific context of a tuition-based, dual language preschool offers an opportunity to examine the complexities of how culture, privilege, achievement, language, and hegemony overlap to create a complex ripple effect (Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2014) of critical factors and contexts that both inform the children's feelings and experiences of school, and also foreshadow what is to come as they transition into a variety of ongoing school scenarios within their racialized, colonial, urban environment.

Author

• David Vining, Columbia Greenhouse Nursery School