International Perspectives on Educating for Democracy in Early Childhood

Stacy Lee DeZutter is an Associate Professor of Education and Psychology and the Chair of the Education Department at Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi, USA.

At first blush, "Children as citizens" seems a category error—but it's actually the provocative theme of this collection. Scholars representing different nations, disciplines, and educational perspectives describe milieus in which children's behaviors, thoughts, and emotions are taken seriously. A worthwhile and mind-expanding read.-- Howard Gardner, Hobbes Research Professor of Cognition and Education, Harvard Graduate School of Education A beautiful example of "think globally, act locally", this volume offers important opportunities for teachers, researchers, and policy makers to learn from one another about how education can support children’s democratic participation now and in the future.-- Ben Mardell, Principal Investigator, Project Zero at the Harvard Graduate School of Education Any educator seeking to expand the definition of 'students' from 'passive learners' to 'active citizens' should read Educating for Democracy in Early Childhood. It's a roadmap to help both school leaders and teachers shift the lens through which they view students and empower children to shape and improve their communities.-- Cynthia Robinson-Rivers, Partner at Transcend and Founder of the Whole Child ModelI welcome this volume with great excitement as a timely contribution to scholarship and policy making. It achieves is a much-needed push for radical/critical perspectives that open ways to acknowledge children as actors of world- and history-making. A strong theoretical frame leads, not surprisingly, to clear practical and policy applications.​-- Anna Stetsenko, Professor, The Graduate Center of The City University of New YorkInternational Perspectives on Educating for Democracy in Early Childhood brings together fresh, timely and much-needed insights about preparing and supporting young children’s active citizenship. The breadth of work included is significant, and means that the book offers a great deal that will be of interest to those involved in research and practice in this area. Collectively and individually, the chapters offer a critical – and yet where appropriate hopeful – analysis of the challenges and opportunities involved in recognising and enabling the young children as citizens. I highly recommend it.-- Andrew Peterson, University of Birmingham, UK

• 1. Introduction: Recognizing Young Children as Citizens in Classrooms Section 1: How should citizenship education be conceptualized? 2. Young Children as Democratic Participants: Ethical Consideration for Research and Practice 3. Challenges for Policy and Practice for Young Children’s Community Building Identified in a Study of Young Children’s Civic Action 4. Gender, Sexual Identities and Citizenship Education: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Canadian Kindergarten Curricula 5. Teaching Demokrasia and Uraia in Tanzanian Pre-Primary Education Programs Teaching Demokrasia and Uraia in Tanzanian Pre-Primary Education Programs 6. Realistic Utopias of the Commons in Education 7. Collaborative Commentary: How Should Citizenship Education Be Conceptualized? 8. Active Citizenship Education with Young Children: Key Themes, Possibilities and Future Research Directions Section 2: How Do Young Children Think About and Enact Citizenship? 9. Citizen Children Raising Their Voices and Striving to Save the Planet … and Themselves 10. Investigating the Implicit: An Exploration of Elementary Students’ Conceptions of Gender 11. Using Multimodal Assessment to Empower Children as Citizens After a Disaster Event 12. “I Don’t Want You to Say No, I Want You to Say Yes”: One Two-Year-Old’s Transformative Dissent 13. Collaborative Commentary: How Do Children Think About and Enact Citizenship? 14. Broadening the Scope of Civic Education – Critical Contributions Section 3: How Do Teachers Support Young Children as Citizens? 15. Children Are Citizens: Encouraging Civic Agency in Our Youngest Learners 16. Teaching Children the Power of Their Voice in a Preschool Classroom 17. Teaching the Black Lives Matter at School: 13-Guiding Principles as Cultural Citizenship Education for Young Children 18. Children’s Empowered Inclusion in Early Childhood Education for Sustainability 19. Comparing the Pacific and the Rural Northeast? Meta-ethnographic Investigations of Citizenship(s) in Progressive ECE Programs 20. Children as Citizens of a Global Society: Learning Together in Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Classrooms 21. Collaborative Commentary: How Do Teachers Support Children as Citizens 22. Love, Empathy, and Global Citizenship Education 23. Children’s Classroom Citizenship Enactment: Challenges and Opportunities