Starting with Children’s Democratic Imagination. A Response to That’s My Voice! Participation and Citizenship in Early Childhood

The article adds to a growing conversation that recognizes and supports young children’s civic capabilities, positioning them as citizens-now and not simply citizens in the future. They detail how three different classrooms sought to work with children to engage in social action on behalf of their broader community. This response wonders alongside the authors about how adults can best work with children to support their civic action and proposes that teachers engage children’s visions for a more just, humanizing democratic society. The article offers three avenues of action for teachers as they support children’s civicness: reflection on our views and experiences with democracy, educating ourselves in the traditions and histories of community organizing, and developing practices that involve children’s visions of society

Creating Classroom Community to Welcome Children Experiencing Trauma

How elementary and early childhood classrooms engage with socio-emotional learning is deeply connected to creating a classroom community. Yet, much of socio-emotional learning curricula focuses on the individual child, rather than on the everyday interactions that build and sustain community. During the Civic Action and Young Children study, we spent a year in a Head Start preschool in Texas, where we noticed that although many children in the class struggled with varied difficult circumstances including poverty, homelessness, discrimination and threat of deportation, the teachers did not label them as homeless, illegal immigrants or poor. Additionally, children seemed to help one another more than we saw in other preschool classrooms. This paper focuses on Ms. Luz and Ms. Louisa’s classroom of 17 preschool students and how they created a community that supported a young Latino boy, Luis, who experienced housing insecurity during his year in the classroom. Luis’s story highlights how the collective idea of civicness, i.e., acting with and on behalf of the community created authentic opportunities for creating and sustaining community. Rather than working with a child experiencing trauma through an individualized and decontextualized curricula, focusing on the community created opportunities for all children to practice authentic care and for Luis to experience inclusion in the community. We offer five implications and recommendations to create classroom communities that both welcome children experiencing trauma and create authentic opportunities for children to enact civicness

“Courage to take on the bull”: Cultural citizenship in fifth-grade social studies

Critiques of traditional civic education as exclusionary toward individuals and groups that are linguistically, culturally, and age-diverse have led to critical civic education that foregrounds the experiences and assets of Communities of Color. Elementary-aged Children of Color face civic marginalization because of their multiple identities, including culture and age. We present a case study of one white fifth-grade teacher, Ms. Vine, and her two classes of culturally and linguistically diverse students who engaged in critical social studies content that created opportunities for students to use and learn about cultural citizenship. We highlight three cultural citizenship practices seen across students’ engagement with social studies content. First, students engaged in self-definition and identity work, laying the groundwork for further critical civic education. Second, the class interrogated issues of injustice and civic action through attention to counternarratives inclusive of Children and Communities of Color as civic actors. Finally, students grappled with historical agency in counternarratives and negotiated agency within the classroom. These cultural citizenship practices enabled Black and Brown children to draw on their civic assets, engage a conception of civicness reflective of people like themselves, and forwarded critical elementary social studies practices

Critical geography in preschool: Evidence of early childhood civic action and ideas about justice

Background: U.S. preschool children from Latinx immigrant and Black communities often experience schooling rooted in compliance and overdiscipline. In these contexts, schools do not recognize the rich lived experiences of Children of Color as suitable for civic learning. This article explores how, when schools value young Children of Color as capable and their work as important, classrooms become sites of children’s daily embodied civic action. Purpose: Our study sought to better understand how children conceptualize and enact their ideas about community and to document the kinds of civic action present in early childhood classrooms. Applying theoretical tools of critical geography, we specifically analyzed how children used space and materials to enact their vision of a just community. Participants: Three classrooms—an inclusion classroom, a bilingual classroom, and an English-only general education classroom—located within a Head Start center in South Texas participated in this study. The campus is roughly 65% Latinx, 33% Black, and 2% White, serving 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old children. Research Design: This study used a multisited, comparative ethnographic methodology. Multisited ethnography allows researchers to locate patterns and contextual differences that impact people’s lived experiences. Initially, researchers conducted ethnographic observations through field notes, photographs, and short videos documenting children’s action on behalf of or with the classroom community. Next, we used video-cued ethnographic methods, filming for three days in each classroom and editing the footage into a 20-minute film. We showed that film to teachers, families, and children in focus groups. Analysis occurred in multiple phases, during which we refined codes through individual, partner, participant, and team-level work. Findings: Children used physical space and materials to assert community membership and to strengthen community ties. They adapted space and classroom materials to include other community members in shared activities. Finally, children advocated for space for their own purposes. Conclusions: When teachers and administrators approach the classroom as a civic space where children representing racial, linguistic, and ability diversity can access embodied experiences with civic action, children can use their space to act on behalf of the community. Rather than offering lesson-based social-emotional learning, schools can reflect on how children might build a just, caring community through authentic embodied experiences that include having some control over space and materials. Doing so may allow a shift toward class environments that support shared endeavors and opportunities for children to care for community members

Reconceptualizing civic education for young children: Recognizing embodied civic action

Traditional conceptions of civic education for young children in the United States tend to focus on student acquisition of patriotic knowledge, that is, identifying flags and leaders, and practicing basic civic skills like voting as decision-making. The Civic Action and Young Children study sought to look beyond this narrow vision of civic education by observing, documenting, and contextualizing how young children acted on behalf of and with other people in their everyday early childhood settings. In the following paper, we offer examples from three Head Start classrooms to demonstrate multiple ways that young children act civically in everyday ways. When classrooms and teachers afford young children more agency, children’s civic capabilities expand, and they are able to act on behalf of and with their community. Rather than teaching children about democracy and citizenship, we argue for an embodied, lived experience for young children

Boletín del Servicio Meteorológico Nacional: Epoca 2.ª Número 588 - 1953 Agosto 10

We report the discovery of an excess of main-sequence turnoff stars in the direction of the constellations of Eridanus and Phoenix from the first-year data of the Dark Energy Survey (DES). The Eridanus–Phoenix (EriPhe) overdensity is centered around l ~ 285 and b ~ -60 and spans at least 30° in longitude and 10° in latitude. The Poisson significance of the detection is at least 9s. The stellar population in the overdense region is similar in brightness and color to that of the nearby globular cluster NGC 1261, indicating that the heliocentric distance of EriPhe is about d ~ 16 kpc. The extent of EriPhe in projection is therefore at least ∼4 kpc by ∼3 kpc. On the sky, this overdensity is located between NGC 1261 and a new stellar stream discovered by DES at a similar heliocentric distance, the so-called Phoenix Stream. Given their similar distance and proximity to each other, it is possible that these three structures may be kinematically associated. Alternatively, the EriPhe overdensity is morphologically similar to the Virgo overdensity and the Hercules–Aquila cloud, which also lie at a similar Galactocentric distance. These three overdensities lie along a polar plane separated by ∼120° and may share a common origin. Spectroscopic follow-up observations of the stars in EriPhe are required to fully understand the nature of this overdensity