Our webinar with Professor Beth Blue Swadener and Dr Lacey Peters explored how teachers and leaders involved in early childhood education can authentically and meaningfully engage with children’s voices, perspectives, and experiences, and utilise these voices in their teaching practice. Professor Beth Blue Swadener and Dr Lacey Peters drew on their research which has long focused on bringing to the table marginalised voices and the knowledge and values that historically have been excluded, and on exploring the promise that children, families, and diverse communities across the world can bring. Their discussion promoted a high level of reflection by exploring how key ideas around social justice and children’s rights can influence and inform the day-to-day work of teachers.
The key insights from the webinar include:
Definitions of social justice are often conceptualised in relation to access to resources and principles of equity and inclusion. They address issues such as how children and families are welcomed, included, and represented in curricula and programmes, and support teachers to create spaces that are more inclusive and expansive, in terms of recognising and affirming a range of ways of being. Families also experience social justice issues in terms of accessing early childhood education services, particularly in relation to the cost of services. Strategies can be focused on addressing injustices (examples are anti-racist, anti-sexist, inclusive curricula, as well as linguistically diverse or bilingual programmes). For early childhood teachers, working for social justice means working with children and families who are othered and supporting them to actualise their rights to resources and full participation.
Social justice can often be supported through concepts of human rights, which include Indigenous rights, and the specific rights identified for children within the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child [UNCRC]. While many people are aware of children’s rights in relation to protection and provision, children also have rights to participation, which means that they have the right to a say in matters that affect them. This is not just a matter of listening to children, but also acting on their perspectives. It involves a systematic way of consulting that needs to be very open-ended (avoiding questions that allow only fixed answers, or that push children towards particular responses). Social justice is increasingly also concerned with environmental justice and sustainability issues.
Social justice can also be examined at the level of the collective and the structural. Human rights, for example, can pertain to groups of people in ways that are highly communitarian and that recognise the collectivist rather than individualistic orientation of many cultures. The concept of justice also has a number of levels, from punitive and retributive justice (focused on ‘paying back’ those traditionally denied justice), redistributive justice (concerned with redistributing resources), and transformative justice (which supports all people to become aware of and work to transform injustices in their environments and communities). These are often reflected in ways that teachers manage conflict and guidance in classrooms.
Agency is an important concept related to children’s participation rights. Agency refers to the way that children are recognised as having social influence, with capacity to act as active protagonists. It involves genuine recognition of children’s power to form their own opinions and create their own solutions, which has implications for the way that children are involved in shared decision-making with adults (paying attention to the way in which appropriate forms of agency vary according to one’s social and cultural identity.) Teachers may have to problematise some of society’s more common-place constructions about children’s agency that assume their limited power, such as those that view children as ‘sponges’ or ‘parrots’, or as incapable of talking about complex issues, and that lead to children being silenced or ignored in adult-centred spaces. Another risk to children’s and teachers’ agency relates to perceptions of what is required for school readiness, especially if children are not seen as individuals in their own right but as data points for measuring specific outcomes.
Nothing about us without us! Children are never too young to participate and to communicate their needs and desires – and have their views given due weight. We can learn about children’s perspectives and opinions through observing them (including videotaping them), and seeing how they communicate their wishes, needs, happiness, and unhappiness. Teachers need to look carefully in order to notice the nuances in the way that children participate. They can also teach other children to notice what each other’s non-verbal behaviour is communicating. Children have a deep sense of fairness – an early form of understanding justice, and this can be an entry point for an anti-bias curriculum, and to learn to confront basic issues of power and voice with children.
Early childhood teachers and educators also have rights to social justice, to be listened to and to have their wellbeing cared for. This is important because early childhood educators who are not cared for and whose voices are marginalised are likely to be limited in their ability to actualise children’s rights. In the US, early childhood educators have long experienced equity issues, being undervalued, disrespected, and undercompensated. Early childhood educators often experience significant burnout because of these larger systemic issues.
There are many things early childhood teachers are doing and can do to promote social justice for children, families, and communities. First of all, teachers can ensure that children are scaffolded to understand that they have rights, and are supported and encouraged to exercise their rights. Teachers might reflect upon the ways in which children are subjects and the ways in which they are subjugated in their everyday lives, and from there push for advocacy. Teachers can support children in their attempts to create change by facilitating opportunities for children to contribute to wider ongoing issues in their immediate and wider environments. From a collective perspective on social justice, teachers can also play an important role in building community and coalitions. Finally, teachers can remain open to new understandings, while remembering to care for themselves and ensure their own wellbeing.
Teachers can create important opportunities to showcase children’s capacity for forming opinions and taking action in relation to complex issues. For example, although children are often involved in learning about sustainability, this can be limited to simple practices such as gardening and recycling. Instead, children are capable of considering more complex ideas such as the way in which economic justice is related to social justice. Children are highly capable of understanding complex issues and the function they might perform in relation to creating change, and of consenting to and actively constructing their own role.
