Politics on the Playground: Children's Participation in Social Movements

• In Event: Composing Futures: Children, Youth, and Teachers Dreaming Educational Justice in and Through Writing

Abstract

Purpose
Amidst multiple global pandemics—from racial violence to COVID-19—communities are continuing to mobilize around collective activism. Within protests and movements are “signs” of literacy where writing, oratories, slogans, and symbols in both print and digital forms circulate messages and mobilize communities. Children are involved in this visual landscape: as props, as participants, as future citizens, as contributors to civic discourse.

Theoretical Framework
Scholarship in critical childhoods recognizes children as political beings in the present (Dumas & Nelson, 2016; Templeton & Cheruvu, 2020). They are social/political actors who move and are moved by the conditions populating the current landscape, as raced, gendered, classed, dis/abled (Cook, 2002). Within these socially constructed categories, children are also active contributors to their daily experiences. Although adults might hold power and authority over participation, children question and disrupt these same hierarchies through critical play (Campano et al., 2015) and critical literacy (Vasquez et al., 2019).

Methods
Aside from the hypervisible forms of civic engagement, I highlight children’s everyday practices that make visible their political and social identities. Drawing from a year-long ethnographic project in a 2nd grade classroom in NYC, I begin with an analysis of the visual (Rose, 2016) in children’s sign-making, particularly for the Women’s March in 2016 (shortly after the inauguration of Donald Trump). While the analysis begins with the artifacts and signs created at a specific moment in time, I draw from ethnographic data across a 9-month period to understand the contextual, ideological, and experiential perspectives underlying this literacy event (Pahl & Rowsell, 2011). What do these signs or literate acts say about their civic engagement and identity? How do children participate and contribute to civic discourse through writing, play, and conversations across the year? Through audio-recorded classroom conversations, observations of children’s play, in/formal written work, photographs, and other artifacts across the year, I feature children’s political and social motivations as cumulative and networked through multiple engagements over time.

Findings
Although visible signs of civic engagement are typically highlighted, particularly those involving children as political props—embodied and imaged—the data narrates the less visible, daily experiences populating children’s life at school. Children were committed to their religious beliefs, disrupted and reproduced gender hierarchies, expressed populist and democratic political beliefs, and upheld and defended their racial identities. While concerned with these larger political issues, they were also invested in more recess, cleaner bathrooms, and more choice and agency at school. Using both official school literacy and unofficial moments of play (Dyson, 2013), children made known political intentions and identities daily, within the pockets of curriculum and influenced by peers.

Significance
The paper does not diminish the value of children marching in protests, standing in picket lines, making signs, and participating alongside adults towards social change. However, this work does question what goes unnoticed in children’s daily lives. Perhaps we miss opportunities to think with and alongside children’s inquiries into their social, political worlds when we overlook their play, their in/formal writing, and their innocuous conversations with peers and adults.

Author

• Haeny S. Yoon, Teachers College, Columbia University