Young Children's Community Building in Action

Embodied, Emplaced and Relational Citizenship

Louise Gwenneth Phillips, Jenny Ritchie, Lavina Dynevor, Jared Lambert, Kerryn Moroney

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138369658
• eBook ISBN: 9780429767272
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Rethinking the concepts of citizenship and community in relation to young children, this groundbreaking text examines the ways in which indigenous understandings and practices applied in early childhood settings in Australia and New Zealand encourage young children to demonstrate their care and concern for others and so, in turn, perceive themselves as part of a larger community.

Young Children's Community Building in Action acknowledges global variations in the meanings of early childhood education, of citizenship and community building, and challenges widespread invisibility and disregard of Indigenous communities. Through close observation and examination of early years settings in Australia and New Zealand, chapters demonstrate how practices guided by Aboriginal and M?ori values support and nurture children's personal and social development as individuals, and as citizens in a wider community. Exploring what young children's citizenship learning and action looks like in practice, and how this may vary within and across communities, the book provides a powerful account of effective pedagogical approaches which have been long excluded from mainstream dialogues.

Written for researchers and students of early childhood education and care, this book provides insight into what citizenship can be for young children, and how Indigenous cultural values shape ways of knowing, being, doing and relating.

1

COMMUNITY BUILDING, CITIZENSHIP, COLONISATION AND GLOBALISATION

Recognition of young children as active citizens is relatively new in theory, policy and practice, and so there is a paucity of research and writing that examines early childhood experiences pertaining to young children’s civic learning and action. Whilst there is increasing recognition in early childhood education curricula of young children’s competence and capacity, little is known of what young children’s citizenship learning and action looks like in practice. This book discusses findings from a comparative, ethnographic study within two early childhood settings, one in an Aboriginal Australian community in Queensland, Australia and the other in a predominately Māori and Pacific Island peoples’ community in Porirua, New Zealand. Based on extensive ethnographic data we explore how children, educators, environments and communities construct children as citizens and the scope of civic action initiated by children. We describe the pedagogies and environments that foster children’s capacities for civic participation and engagement, and the structural impediments to young children’s civic learning and action. We have not sought to demonstrate any equivalences between the two nations and their Indigenous peoples and ontologies, but instead to invite enhanced awareness of the very different historical, colonisation and contemporary contexts.

By working with Indigenous collectivist communities and young children, citizenship is redefined in relational and embodied ways as reflecting community values and customary processes. We argue, firstly, that recognition and application of civic teaching and learning as a life continua commencing in early childhood education will produce informed global active citizens, and secondly, that the world can learn significantly from Indigenous communities about foundational principles of living and working with others for the common good of both humanity and the planet. We communicate these arguments through decolonised readings of the landscape of citizenship; analysing how national and cultural conceptualisations of young children mediate children’s, families’ and teachers’ participation in civic action; illustrating how cultural values shape and define young children’s civic action; and foregrounding Indigenous children’s ways of enacting community rights and responsibilities (civic action).

But first what is ‘citizenship’ and is it the term that we want to use? The word citizen stems from the Latin word civitas with the idea emerging in the Greek city states between about 700–600 BC and located in Aristotle’s Politics, being defined as a person that is both ruled and rules (Chesterman & Galligan, 2009) as a concept for societal organisation. However, Indigenous societies existed for many thousands of years before this …

Aboriginal Australian ways of knowing, being, doing and relating

Aboriginal Australian peoples have always been here, on the land now known as Australia (Pascoe, 2014). Scientific thinking has sought to measure and trace origins; to date archaeological evidence dates back to 65,000 years ago, with the out-of-Africa theory disputed (Clarkson et al., 2017). Aboriginal people have always lived here. Listen to the old people, they know. What we share here is knowledge that is in the public domain. To know, be, do and relate in Aboriginal Australian ways can really only be known through the lived experience of Aboriginality.

KERRYN: It’s hard to be explicit and speak about what it is to be Aboriginal in just one context and it’s difficult. It’s much more and includes actions and connections and more than can be isolated to words on paper. It’s doing. Because we don’t give enough time to let other things speak – like to the wind and the Country. The stories that have guided my being remind me to think about how we can throw a lot of words around all the time … I feel I can yarn here now with Louise in a culturally safe space as we have taken the time walking, listening and learning from the voices and stories of the Country and its people.

Pursuant to Aboriginal worldviews, published texts, archival material, images in art, digital mediums, artefacts or otherwise are not lifeless data waiting to be collected, interpreted and reconstituted by perceptions … Aboriginal stories, however expressed or embodied, hold power, spirit and agency. Knowledge can never be truly separated from the diverse Countries that shaped the ancient epistemologies of Aboriginal people, and the many voices of Country speak through the embodiment of story into text, object, symbol or design.

(Kwaymullina, Kwaymullina & Butterfly, 2013, p. 5)

Aboriginal societal ways of knowing, being, doing and relating are grounded in the spirituality of what is named in English as ‘Dreaming’, though many Aboriginal peoples feel ‘Dreaming’ provides a poor description of a complex belief system embedded in tens of thousands of years of tradition, story, ceremony and lore which honour spiritual connection to country (as in earth, not Western construction of nation) and kinship rules. The spirituality of Aboriginality is communicated through traditional stories, art and ceremony, which:

describe that to people you know, what it is to be you. What it is to be you, you’ve got to follow that colour. And that fits into the Land, of what it is, your relationship, your close guidedness, and also close memories. You’ve got that memory of those people in you, the colours of those, who they are, alakenhe. You’ve got to know it, you’ve got to know that to be really you.

(Turner, 2010, p. 60)

Aboriginal lore is taught through story; knowledge is known through story.

On Quandamooka (North Stradbroke Island, Moreton Island and Bay and part of the coast of Brisbane), according to Karen Martin (2003): ‘We believe that country is not only the Land and People, but is also the Entities of Waterways, Animals, Plants, Climate, Skies and Spirits’ (purposefully honouring all of these entities full respect through proper nouns) (p. 2017). As Kerryn explains, we don’t own country, country owns us. From an Aboriginal perspective, responsibility to country:

is grave; there is no hiding in a conscious universe … the exercise of will in a situation where the choice to deny moral action is to turn one’s back on the cosmos and ultimately on one’s self. The choice to assume responsibility is a multivalent one involving self-interest, reverence, morality, and mysticism.

(Rose, 1987, p. 264)

Spiritual connection to country, Bunurong man Bruce Pascoe explains, runs deep through all actions: ‘there is no separation between the sacred and non-sacred’ (Pascoe, 2014, p. 127).

Through such an ontology ‘Aboriginal people constructed a system of pan-continental government that generated peace and prosperity’ (Pascoe, 2014, p. 129) for tens of thousands of years. Perhaps it is the complex system of kinship that enabled peaceful co-existence with others. With kin classifications, as ‘the very basis of social structure’ (Yengyoyan, 1987, p. 212), complex genealogical and status relationships to others are known and enacted. Aboriginal kinship rules are laws spiritually ascribed by sacred ancestors and are extraordinarily more sophisticated than European kinship systems, with most defining 28 kinship roles (Langton, 2018). Aboriginal kinship system is based on a collectivist ontology in which people think of themselves in terms of their relationship to others and their community (Yeo, 2003). The kinship system, and a shared set of values determines how Aboriginal people work together (Lohoar, Butera & Kennedy, 2014). Children learn their kinship relations, behaviours, rights and responsibilities progressively from a very young age (Daylight & Johnstone, 1986). ‘We as Aboriginal people, we always relate to other people, connect with them, no matter who we are. If I see an Aboriginal person … I’ll always say “that person is one of us, he’s part of us”’ (Turner, 2010, p. 7). An outsider with no identified kinship link is allocated a kinship role, so that a kinship relationship is defined and authorised. For example, Kerryn and Louise, as outsiders to the Gundoo community, were referred to as Aunty by the children and Sis(ter) by educators. The kinship system is not only about human relationships, but also relationships with land, water, flora and fauna, and spiritual beings, understood through totemic and skin systems. Any encounter with another is enacted from a premise of relationality and respect. For example, Aboriginal people worked in partnership with dolphins in bays to drive fish in to catch (Pascoe, 2014, p. 143), supporting an ethos of living with all living beings sustainably: only take what you need – so we can come back. As Uncle Bob Anderson (1998) shares ‘All living things, be they mammals, birds, reptiles, insects or trees are our sisters and brothers and therefore we must protect them. We are their custodians. We not only share with them; we also guard them’ (p. 8).

Further,

The songlines [spiritual routes of connection to country] of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people connected clans from one side of the country to another. The cultural, economic, genetic and artistic conduits of the songlines brought goods, art, news, ideas, technology and marriage partners to centres of exchange.

(Pascoe, 2014, p. 129)

There were/are agreed shared values and norms, intergenerationally passed on through Ancestral Law and enacted through ritual practices and deference to Elders (Keen, 2004). Some of this law is reflected in Kakadu Elder, Bill Neidjie’s (1986) poem – ‘Law of the land’:¹

Our story is in the land…

It is written in those sacred places.

My children will look after those places,

That’s the law.

Dreaming place…

You can’t change it, no matter who you are.

No matter you rich man, no matter you king

You can’t change it.

I feel it in my body

With my blood.

Feeling all these trees,

All this country

When this wind blow you can feel it.

Same for country…

You feel it.

You can look, but feeling…

That make you.

While you sleeping

you dream something.

Tree and grass same thing.

They grow with your body,

With your feeling.

You brought up with earth, tree and water.

Karen Martin (2003) explains further:

Ways of Knowing are specific to ontology and Entities of Land, Animals, Plants, Waterways, Skies, Climate and the Spiritual systems of Aboriginal groups … We are part of the world as much as it is part of us, existing within a network of relations amongst Entities that are reciprocal and occur in certain contexts. This determines and defines for us rights to be earned and bestowed as we carry out rites to country, self and others – our Ways of Being … Our Ways of Doing are a synthesis and an articulation of our Ways of Knowing and Ways of Being. These are seen in our languages, art, imagery, technology, traditions and ceremonies, land management practices, social organisation and social control … these are life stage, gender and role specific.

(pp. 209–210)

Leadership for governance was/is enacted through Elders elevated through gradual and complex initiation processes, and earnt respect (not because of force or inheritance) (Pascoe, 2014). Though the elderly are highly respected as important community contributors, Elders are not always elderly, but are rather selected for maturity (not necessarily biological), cultural knowledge and leadership abilities (Lohoar, Butera & Kennedy, 2014; McIntyre, 2001). They impart the law to their clans, tribes and communities. Each group has rights and responsibilities for different pieces of the:

epic integrity of the land … They had to imagine how the whole picture looked and they had absolute confidence in the coherence of the accretive construction of their law over thousands of years and knew that the jigsaw would make sense and their responsibility was to ensure it continued to make sense.

(Pascoe, 2014, p. 138)

Aboriginal Australian peoples work for the collective good rather than individual achievement. Focus is on what the group can achieve collectively (Martin, 2008, p. 44). Justice, peace protection, management of social roles and the division of the land’s wealth were/are defined by ancestral law and interpreted by those chosen as the senior Elders (Pascoe, 2014). Bruce Pascoe, from the Bunurong clan of the Kulin nation, claims that Aboriginal government is the most democratic model of all the systems humans have devised, as it worked across a large land mass for diverse populations surviving thousands of years, and that isolation from vastly different cultures and worldviews may well have enabled the conditions for longstanding peace (p. 132). This claim by Pascoe is substantiated by recognition that across all the archaeological investigations carried out in Australia there has been no evidence found of wars between Aboriginal tribes or clans. Individual acts of violence are evident in ancient Aboriginal art, but ‘there is no trace of imperial warfare’ (p. 130). This is extraordinarily significant through its rarity in the history of humanity, and as Pascoe asserts ‘demands respect’ and ‘must be investigated’ (p. 130). Yet, colonisers foolishly ignored and continue...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• A note about the cover
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Preface – locating ourselves
• 1. Community building, citizenship, colonisation and globalisation
• 2. Children and childhood in discourses at play in Australia and New Zealand
• 3. Decolonising methodologies with children and community
• 4. Gundoo community and how Gundoo children show community building
• 5. Katoa community and children’s community building at Katoa Kindergarten
• 6. Environments and pedagogies for children’s community building
• 7. Challenges for policy and practice for young children’s community building
• Index