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Introduction
The Sociology of Early Childhood takes you on a journey into the lived experiences of young children from birth to the age of eight. Drawing on sociological research, which explores the social factors that influence every human life, this book will illustrate the powerful and persistent pressures which act on children, wherever in the world they are born. Differences among human beings are often refreshing or interesting, but they have been used throughout history to treat certain groups of people unfairly. We ask you to look again at these differences, as an educator, and decide for yourself what impact they have on the children you are teaching, and what you can do about this.
Each chapter will begin with questions which aim to draw you into the big issues ā giving you an immediate sense of what you will be learning in that section. Next weāll give you a story ā a narrative about the social world of children ā to ground you in the daily work that we are discussing. Then we will dive right into what will be most useful for you to know as an educator, in dealing with the complexities of each aspect of teaching in a modern and diverse world. At the end we have questions, activities and resources to help you make connections between what you have read, and how you might use it in your educational work with children from birth to eight.
We know that as an educator you care deeply about the wellbeing of the children that you work with. As the chapters unfold, you will learn about what it means to be a baby, to grow older and to become part of educational systems and societies, from a sociological perspective. You will learn about the importance of a holistic view of health, about the significance of environments and emotions, and the ways that families, communities and local contexts all play a role in the lives of young children. Throughout all of this our aim is to help you feel confident in dealing with the complexities of young childrenās lives, so you can teach every child in ways that respect who they are, and help them thrive in your classroom. So letās get started ā¦
Questions for consideration
ā¢What sorts of ideas is sociology interested in, and why are these important for early childhood educators?
ā¢All societies are webs of relationships among people, at a particular time and in a specific place within the natural world. How do the effects of power and privilege shape these relationships in your society right now? Which people are most marginalised in your community, and why?
Vignette from practice
Kahlil is a four-year-old child in your class, where you teach in a childcare service run by your local municipality. You have always found Kahlil to be a happy child, although fairly quiet, and are glad to have the chance to work with him again this year. During outdoor play on a mild day near the end of first term, you are sitting digging with Kahlil in the sandpit. It is near the end of the day, with the sun slanting through the trees, and many children have been picked up already, making this a peaceful moment in an otherwise busy teaching day. Perhaps triggered by a particularly vivid memory from the previous year of digging in that same space, Kahlil starts to tell you something that shocks and saddens you. Hesitantly at first, but then with increasing intensity, Kahlil tells about his experience of two older children ā both boys ā who he was terrified by last year. It has taken him some months into this new year, but he has realised he can start to feel safe, and that his tormentors will no longer be around to make his life miserable.
You know that sometimes children can be cruel to each other, but what bothers you most is that you did not notice any of this going on in your class last year. Your mind races; āHow did I miss this? Why didnāt I protect Kahlil from this bullying?ā
Giving Kahlil a hug, you tell him how sorry you are that he had to live through this, and that you did not realise what was going on and do something about it. You want to remind him to tell you when anything is bothering him, but realise this is only going to burden him further. Perhaps he did try to tell you last year, but you were too preoccupied to notice, or misunderstood his hesitant efforts. You have work to do, you can see, in how you handle conflict and meanness in your group, and to find ways to make your classroom a safer space for all children.
The sociology of early childhood
As authors, we believe that early childhood education has not paid enough attention to sociology. Sociology is the study of society, and the ways that power shapes and reshapes both large societal structures (the government, media, education) as well as individual interactions between human beings. Sociologists acknowledge that the world is not an equal place, and believe that understanding how inequality originates and is maintained is vitally important. As early childhood educators, whether new or very experienced, this sort of understanding is valuable. It will help you to see why relationships with some families may be unexpectedly difficult, or why children react so differently to the same sorts of behaviour guidance. We believe that attending to sociological aspects of our experiences provides perspectives that otherwise would go unnoticed. This book draws you into the world of early childhood practice, and gives you a sociological take on childrenās lives, on pedagogical practice, on relationships with others and on our curriculum choices.
The story above, about Kahlil, reveals the everyday power relationships that occur in early childhood settings. It talks about how Kahlil has felt marginalised within this learning community, and has been bullied by two other children, so that he felt silenced and terribly afraid. This is a direct manifestation of power, through violence, intimidation and threat (although power is often wielded in more subtle ways). To a sociologist, there are particular questions raised by this incident. Has this child been targeted because they are from a non-dominant ethnic background, or because they are from a Muslim family? Maybe it is because Kahlil is a quiet child, who prefers to do things like drawing, rather than join in the active and aggressive games that many boys in this group seem to prefer? Has this educator been unable to see this violence and intimidation because their privilege as a āwhiteā person has allowed them to be blind to possible manifestations of racism? Have ideas about childrenās innocence, based on myths about age and experience, also worked to make such violence unthinkable, and so invisible? Or is it simply that Kahlil has been overlooked in favour of other children who demanded more attention, who were more verbally competent or outgoing, or were more familiar culturally to the educators present?
These sorts of questions are central to the practice of sociology, because they are about recognising that some forms of inequality will have significant impacts on the life chances of particular people. In this case, Kahlil may have been unable to take advantage of a year of rich early educational experiences, because his attention and energy were absorbed by fear and working out how to feel safe. If these sorts of experiences are repeated for Kahlil throughout his educational journey (as is true for many children from marginalised backgrounds) then he will not be able to learn as effectively or become the person he might have been without these repeated negative experiences.
Inequality impacts on everybody, but it has the hardest and longest impacts on those who are most disadvantaged in our communities. We believe that as educators you care about unfairness. We want you to have the knowledge and the skills to deal with it more effectively, so that your efforts will make the world a better and safer place for all the children under your care.
The big issues ā power, privilege and marginalisation
One of the most important ideas we are talking about in this book is power, and how we can see this operating in society through the unearned privileges some groups of people have, while others do not. Why do we call them āunearnedā privileges? Most people are comfortable with privilege that can be earned, such as people being rewarded for their skills, hard work, good behaviour or special qualifications. When we talk about unearned privileges we are thinking about things like the colour of your skin, the gender you were assigned at birth, the wealth of your family or even being conventionally attractive according to the standards of the country and era you were born into.
One example of unearned privilege you may not have noticed (unless you are reading this as someone whose first language is not English) is the privilege that comes with being born into particular language communities. Across the world, some languages are used by many people because they were once the language of trade (e.g. English, Spanish, French), as a result of histories of colonisation. At the moment English is a particularly influential language because it is the dominant language in the United States, which has been the worldās most politically influential and wealthy nation for much of the last century. Being able to speak English fluently and comfortably is a form of privilege, because you will find this language used by others wherever you travel on the globe, within many educational institutions and in much of the worldās publishing.
We will be talking about privilege, and the power that comes with this, throughout this book, as well as the absence of privilege, which can be called marginalisation, powerlessness or disadvantage. When particular groups are marginalised, we are using a metaphor about being pushed to the edges of society, from where it can be difficult to be noticed or heard. Sometimes this is literally what happens, when refugees are forced into internment camps away from major population centres, but more often it is about lack of access to services, support or mainstream public discourse.
It is hard to talk about privilege because those who are privileged do not want to think about the unfair advantages they have received. There will be times in this book when you will be asked to notice your own privilege. You may find this uncomfortable, and in some cases it may even make you angry. This is okay! It is normal to feel defensive when you start to realise the advantages you have grown up with, without ever noticing them. This is a form of resistance, and is something we will talk more about when discussing the theory that underpins this book.
Dimensions of inequality
Before we do so, we need to explain about the differences that tend to become a focus for privilege and disadvantage in most countries, which we call dimensions of inequality. Any person from a privileged group is likely to have more; more money, more influence, more time to speak and so on. People tend to think about these dimensions of inequality simplistically as absolute differences, rather than just varying experiences of being human. We hope we can help you to see more complexity in each of these dimensions of inequality, as well as the important differences between them in the impacts they have on our societies. This complexity means that within any given category ā āwomenā, āable-bodied peopleā ā there will always be considerable variation, because these dimensions of inequality intersect with each other (see breakout box).
Intersectionality
Theories of intersectionality, based on the foundational work of KimberlƩ Crenshaw (1991), help us to understand that different dimensions of inequality can sometimes reinforce each other, making their effects more harmful. In other circumstances the effects of inequality may be lessened, such as when male privilege might offset some of the disadvantages of racial prejudice. Crenshaw sought to show that the impacts of gender, race and sexuality on the lives of Black women in the US cannot be understood separately, but only through observing the material impacts of these dimensions of inequality in aggregate, and their differential effects for individual women and their contexts.
While we cannot always draw attention to these intersectional effects in our examples, as an educator it will always add to your understanding of a situation to think about how a particular child or family might be impacted by multiple dimensions of inequality.
Gender ā unexamined lives
Within education, one of the most important of these dimensions is gender. This is the idea that there are only two types of people in this world; women or men, girls or boys. When we are born we are usually put into one of these categories without having any say in the matter, based on a casual inspection of our external genitalia by medical staff. However human bodies are not simple, and what we tend to think of as gender is actual a complex inter-relationship between our chromosomes (containing genes), the hormones circulating in our bodies, the appearance of our bodies and our emerging identity in relation to current expectations of gendered behaviour. Increasingly we know that many peopleās bodies do not fit neatly into one of these two gender categories (some of these people would describe themselves as intersex), and there is emerging awareness that many peopleās identities as human beings do not fit easily into categories of female and male either. Some people will transition from their assigned gender to another one. Some will continue to experience their gender as changing (genderfluid), undefined, or absent entirely (agender, neutrois). An increasing proportion of the population see themselves as genderqueer, or non-binary, a gender different from either female or male (see online link to these gender definitions, at the end of the chapter).
Whatever you believe about gender, we know that for most of history, and across nearly every society, men are privileged at the expense of women, earning more money, doing less domestic and emotional work, and wielding more political power. Education plays a role in this, and we will see throughout the book the ways in which education often reinforces social expectations of gender, either consciously or unconsciously, through differing expectations of behaviour, school dress codes and preferential treatment.
Social class ā letās not talk about this!
Many people would like to believe that social class is not an issue i...
