Young Children and Their Communities

Understanding Collective Social Responsibility

Gillian Sykes, Eleonora Teszenyi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781138558502
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351364812
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

By approaching the concept of community through the lens of early childhood, this valuable book acknowledges the role that diverse and multiple communities play in supporting a child's early development, and explores how their value can be harnessed in our ever-evolving and fast-changing world.

Young Children and Their Communities delves deeper into the many layers of communities to which children belong. With a focus on key theoretical perspectives, such as social empathy and the pedagogy of friendships, the book seeks to expand readers' understanding of the concept of community by considering a range of both established and emerging communities, including peer groups, digital communities, the extended family and intergenerational learning. Chapters explore how various communities contribute to and enhance young children's lives, and examine how children can in turn enrich the communities they are part of. Illustrative vignettes and points for reflection are included throughout, along with helpful research summaries and links to current policy.

Reiterating the importance of communities and illustrating the rich opportunities they offer to children, Young Children and Their Communities will inform students' and early years practitioners' practice as they confront new challenges and opportunities in fields of early childhood education, social work and sociology.

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1	Constructing future communities around collective social responsibility Carmen Mohamed

For almost a century now, successive UK governments have had the opportunity to promote social cohesion through collective social responsibility but, although political rhetoric has alluded to this aspiration, the reality of equality and a socially just society has not materialised.

This chapter:

■ explores Robert Putnam’s (1993) claim that community and equality are mutually reinforcing;

■ merges cultural and social structures such as schooling, the media and child-rearing practices to identify ways of transforming social structures collectively.

Introduction

In writing the charter for the Convention on the Rights of the Child, Eglantyne Jebb stated that ‘for better or worse the whole world can be revolutionised in one generation according to how we treat the children’ (1923). If we are to revolutionise or transform society, Jebb argues that we should begin by enculturating our children into the future we desire. Reconstructing society around collective social responsibility can begin with developing structures and processes which instil these values in our young.

Societies are constructed through shared ideas, beliefs and norms of practice in the way humans treat one another. This builds cohesion in ways of knowing how to belong to particular groups within society whether religious, cultural or generational. Many collective bodies share common ideals about how individuals in the group should conform to an agreed set of rules governing behaviour. This sense of belonging is essential to humans, and many sociological studies, including Putnam’s (1993), have researched how humans build trust within their group. However, a natural outcome of this group belonging is that ‘others’ do not belong to your group – importantly for children, to their friendship group. As parents are naturally keen to ensure that their offspring are equipped to belong to the social, religious and cultural groups they are involved in, this creates separation and division. As a direct result of the technological revolution, spaces for social interaction have dramatically increased. So it is argued here that the need for social communities to develop shared responsibility for codes of behaviour in all social spaces is essential for the well-being of our society.

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This chapter explore theories of socialisation to expose how social processes and structures reproduce cultural stereotypes and normalise the myth of a meritocracy. It aims to demonstrate that by taking collective responsibility for the social and cultural development of our younger generations it is possible to bring unity and equality to society and communities.

Constructing social norms in society

To explain how social norms are constructed we turn to Brown and Cooney (1982) who advocate that belief structures have their roots in Herskovits’ (1943) patterns and processes of cultural transmission, distinguishing between acculturation (contact between cultures); enculturation (the largely unconscious assimilation of cultural norms and knowledge during childhood); and socialisation (the formal processes of social integration, such as education). Our attitudes and behaviour towards people from different social and cultural groups will have been created and confirmed through experiences in school, the media and at home during formative years. There are many examples, globally and historically, of the way in which humans enculturate their young into belonging, which are appropriate for the collective economic and social good. Smaller societies seem better equipped to ensure collective social responsibility, keeping ‘others’ to a collective group of outsiders. In larger, globally interconnected societies, where competition for status and power is prized, individualisation and ‘othering’ as concepts are routinely reconstructed by the political elite. Throughout history, during eras of high political stakes, personal and social spaces are bombarded with rhetoric and hype designed to create fear of the ‘other’. Research presented by Wilkinson and Pickett (2010) clearly outlines that it is trust which promotes ‘a cohesive, cooperative community’ (p. 62). ‘Trust is an important ingredient of any society but it becomes more essential in modern societies with a high degree of interdependence’ (Wilkinson and Pickett, 2010: 214). In essence, because our societies are large and globally dependent, creating communities with a strong sense of social responsibility requires new processes to develop the enculturation of trust and a sense of collective belonging.

According to Wilkinson and Pickett (2010: 51) ‘our position in the social hierarchy affects who we see as part of the “in-group” and who as “out-group”, affecting our ability to identify with and empathise with other people.’ This social positioning of groups by class, race and gender is most often constructed through popular television programmes and news reporting today. Recent political use of rhetoric such as ‘hard-working people’, ‘deserving poor’ and ‘benefit cheats’ align political ideologies to popular culture and social norms, creating the normalisation of the politics of envy. This contributes to the breaking down of the fabric of a society in which collective responsibility and shared community care might thrive. In socially unequal societies, people are encouraged from a very early age to be looking for instant gratification and to engage in frequent comparison of how we are perceived through our possessions. Competing with our friends and neighbours to be more, and to have more creates mistrust and jealousy; this is extended to people ‘not like us’ who, we are told, come to take what is rightfully ours (the poor, immigrants). Positive collective responsibility can be just as easily shared and normalised through media messages and narratives which encourage community building and social responsibility for all age groups.

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Socialisation structures

Identity is created from our sense of self within society: we know who we are in relation to others by, for example, generation, culture, race, ethnicity, social class, gender, ability and language. ‘Children develop their sense of identity from the attitudes of others towards them; they learn from everything that they experience in their environment, everything that happens to them’ (Mohamed, 2006: 146). Children learn what is acceptable to the significant adults around and develop these attitudes as their norm. In the first instance, this will be parents/carers and other family members; soon this social group extends to include a wider range of significant others who will impact on their sense of self-belief. How we and our normal behaviours are accepted by the wider group reassures us as we develop group identity and a sense of belonging.

VIGNETTE

In a study of pre-school practitioners’ attitudes to stereotyping and discrimination, Mohamed (2006) discovered that 42% of the participant responses believed ‘parents have their views and we do not have to agree’ (Mohamed, 2006: 147), effectively absolving themselves of any part to play in the enculturation or socialisation of our young. There is a clear disconnect between the perception of roles and responsibilities in child development. However, if the practitioners were to believe that the raising of children is a community responsibility then there would be an acceptance of their part in the socialisation process, including the disruption of competition and individualisation.

Many of the participant practitioners also shared experiences of how the children choose to play with certain toys, stating that they felt it was wrong to try and make them play with toys the children hadn’t chosen for themselves (Mohamed, 2006).

When working with children it is difficult to accept that children self-limit due to the pressures of cultural norms and expectations already in place in society, but this knowledge is essential for children’s development. Children’s sense of identity is a fundamental aspect of their development; supporting this development is not just about discussing the differences between individuals or groups: identity is built through interactions. By providing an opportunity to live out inclusive attitudes and values, early education settings can be places where children learn about human rights. If children grow up from the onset of education knowing that everyone has equal value and rights, then they will be more likely to develop collaborative social responsibility through trust and a sense of belonging.

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The role of the popular media

From the beginning, babies are trying to make sense of their own world; as their world widens and changes, they take on board more complex theories and concepts. These have developed from interactions with their own unique environment. Community knowledge and ‘old wives’ tales’ were invaluable in helping new parents recognise the importance of schematic behaviours, such as dropping items from the pushchair or finger-painting with food. Where parents are competitive for their children’s success, the children learn to compare and compete, effectively separating them from the collective and creating individualisation. This parental drive towards competition starts at birth with shared anxieties about crib displays and music to stimulate the brain being driven by popular media. Much of this media hype feeds parental fear of failure and is directed at competition rather than being founded on child development knowledge. The space left by the absence of intergenerational knowledge of child-rearing practices has been filled with a fear of the child not ‘getting a head start’.

By three years of age, children begin to absorb prevailing attitudes about gender, race, ethnicity, social class and disabilities through direct and indirect messages and images. This process occurs regardless of whether or not they have direct contact with people from the groups that are being stereotyped and more commonly occurs through the television programmes directed at young children. The absorption of inaccurate images of different groups impairs the development of all children. The consequences of this for children include distortions of reality, lack of accurate information necessary for living in today’s world, a sense of identity based on hierarchy of skin colour, gender roles and abilities, and tension and fears about people different from themselves. Children have to navigate this information about themselves and ‘others’ to determine where they fit into the order of the community they belong to. This developing sense of belonging will also dictate the way a child develops a sense of social responsibility.

Children in globally interconnected societies have access to an incredible range of multimedia outlets. They may have tablet devices through which they engage in competitive games, testing strategy and skill; they will undoubtedly have access to film and music media through which gender and racial stereotypes are perpetuated. Popular culture through film franchises encourage children to dress and act in particular ways as a demonstration of belonging to an ‘in-group’ which parents often promote for self-gratification. As young as the ages of 3 and 4, children begin to self-limit their choices of play experiences because of the gender norms they are already absorbing. One of the negative consequences of this process is a pattern of uneven cognitive development or ‘practice deficits’ related to the types of activities both boys and girls choose. Between the ages of 3 and 6, most children have developed a deeper understanding of themselves and their world. They are curious about differences and begin to use prevailing stereotypes about people, including themselves, to express their thoughts and guide their actions. This social acceptance of exposing young children to commercial pressure is most prevalent in unequal societies; as a demonstration of status and privilege there is much to learn from societies such as Scandinavia where trust is more highly prized and commercial pressure less invasive (Wilkinson and Pickett, 2010).

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The role of education

Since the ratification of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, developments in education systems have ostensibly enshrined equality and inclusion in policy. The discussion encompassing the socialisation of children in primary classrooms has been widely articulated (Goffman, 1971; Bandura, 1986; Bourdieu, 1982). Many children attend some form of community institution by way of childcare and pre-school education from the age of 3 or 4. This will help shape the cultural norms and beliefs of a child; according to Biesta (2009: 40) ‘education inserts individuals into existing ways of doing and being and, through this, plays an important role in the continuation of culture and tradition – both with regard to its desirable and its undesirable aspects.’ Biesta’s contention here is that one function of the school system is socialisation, including learning how to behave according to the norms of society.

Further to this, Bernstein explains that ‘the relationship basic to cultural reproduction or transformation is essentially the pedagogic relation’ (1975: 197), in other words the pedagogic practices (teaching and cultural practices) employed through education will essentially transform society, or reproduce the status quo. He suggests that to transform society, education employs invisible pedagogies and to reproduce social norms and attitudes, schools employ visible pedagogies. In the visible system of schooling, children know exactly where they fit along the structure of attainment targets; the sequence and hierarchy of success are clearly visible to all: the next book in the reading scheme, even the table children are assigned to sit at – in a type of classroom apartheid, children are labelled by expected success. As Vanderstraeten and Biesta (2006: 169) put it, ‘the social structuring of classroom interaction situations is likely to enhance particular types of experiences at the expense of others.’ Expectations of what a teacher or a pupil ‘is’ and ‘should be’ form the basis of and shape the conditions for classroom encounters. Setting the development of cognitive and social identity within the context of a highly ‘visible pedagogical approach’ to schooling ensures that not only is the status quo reproduced but each member of society has been socialised into the normalisation of position; believing that this is how it should be. Visible pedagogy will always place the emphasis on the performance of the child and the extent to which he or she is meeting the criteria based on the external product, producing differences between children. This pedagogic mechanism ensures individualisation is perpetuated in our classrooms.

In the countries of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), education is perceived through a focus on – which Bernstein (1975) would call highly visible – explicit pedagogies through which, from a young age, we learn individualism and competition. Teachers’ practice, the process and the perspectives that pupils develop to make sense of and adapt to school are part of the socialisation of children. Where teachers hold stereotypical attitudes and beliefs about diverse groups of pupils, these have been shown to create discriminatory teaching practice which affects the educational attainment of pupils as young as five. Separation and competition are divisive and normalise inequality.

Bernstein’s 1975 theory supports Jebb’s (1923) claim in the suggestion that we could transform the way our children are socialised through our educational practices and processes. In an ‘invisible pedagogy’ the rules...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Young Children and their Communities
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• About the Editors and Contributors
• Foreword
• Introduction
• 1 Constructing Future Communities Around Collective Social Responsibility
• 2 Building Communities in Early Years Settings and Schools
• 3 Friendships in Children’s Communities
• 4 Children’s Communities of Mixed Ages
• 5 Never Too Old – Mature Practitioners and Children’s Communities
• 6 Intergenerational Communities – the Young and the Old Together
• 7 Communities of Childminders – a Valuable Resource
• 8 Communities of Children’s Centres – Decline and Fall
• 9 Children’s Communities of Extended Families From Asian Backgrounds
• 10 The Use of Technology to Build Digital Communities
• Final Thoughts From the Editors . . .
• Index