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Early Child Development and Care
ISSN: 0300-4430 (Print) 1476-8275 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/gecd20
Civic action and play: examples from Maori,
Aboriginal Australian and Latino communities
Jennifer Keys Adair, Louise Phillips, Jenny Ritchie & Shubhi Sachdeva
To cite this article: Jennifer Keys Adair, Louise Phillips, Jenny Ritchie & Shubhi Sachdeva (2017)
Civic action and play: examples from Maori, Aboriginal Australian and Latino communities, Early
Child Development and Care, 187:5-6, 798-811, DOI: 10.1080/03004430.2016.1237049
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03004430.2016.1237049
Published online: 07 Nov 2016.
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Civic action and play: examples from Maori, Aboriginal Australian
and Latino communities
Jennifer Keys Adair
a
, Louise Phillips
b
, Jenny Ritchie
c
and Shubhi Sachdeva
a
a
College of Education, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA;
b
School of Education, The University of
Queensland, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia;
c
School of Education, Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington,
New Zealand
ABSTRACT
Using data from an international, comparative study of civic action in
preschools in New Zealand, Australia and the US, we consider some of
the types of civic action that are possible when time and space are
offered for children to use their agency to initiate, work together and
collectively pursue ideas and things that are important to the group. We
use an example from each country and apply the work of Rancière and
Arendt to think about collectivity as civic action in young children’s
schooling lives. Play, rather than an act itself, is positioned here as
political time and space that make such civic action possible in the
everyday lives of children. We argue here that play is the most common
(and endangered) time and space in which children act for the collective.
ARTICLE HISTORY
Received 8 February 2016
Accepted 9 August 2016
KEYWORDS
Play; civic action;
ethnography; early childhood
education; cultural diversity;
political agency
Introduction
While play is often associated with a type of action children do or a concept worth advocating for
because of increasingly rigid early childhood educational programmes (Brown, 2010; Nicholson,
Shimpi, & Rabin, 2014), this article focuses on play as a political space that is free and unstructured.
Play is seen here as a time and space in which children can initiate collective action (Pacini-Ketcha-
baw & Nxumalo, 2015). Using data from an international, comparative project on civic action in pre-
schools, we consider some of the types of civic action that are possible when time and space are
offered for children to use their agency to initiate, work together and collectively pursue ideas and
things that are important to the group. These acts, what we refer to as civic action, are collective
acts. Play, rather than an act itself, is posi tioned here as merely making such a civic action possible
in the everyday lives of children. Consider the following example that took place in Katoa Kindergar-
ten in New Zealand.
A four-year-old boy, Manu, often initiates complex dramatic play scenarios, in which he usually
plays the character of a dog named ‘Toby’. One day (as was usual) several other children joined in,
each determining their own roles. Keanu, Rō pata and Wiremu were all dogs. Charles decided he
was a pussy-cat and Nikau was a puppy. Donald decided he would be a boy rather than an
animal. A younger boy, Mikey, imitated the play at the periphery, without fully joining in. The boys
initiated a fetching game, taking turns to retrieve small beanbags. Donald and Jenny (author)
were assigned the role of being the throwers.
Soon, ‘Toby’ mimed that he had an injury, and suggested that there were Band-Aids in the ima-
ginary cupboard. The game changed and the ‘animals’ now began supplying imaginary plasters
(Band-Aids) and bringing them to Toby to restore his wounds. The game continued for some time,
© 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
CONTACT Jennifer Keys Adair jenniferadair@utexas.edu
EARLY CHILD DEVELOPMENT AND CARE, 2017
VOL. 187, NOS. 5– 6, 798–811
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03004430.2016.1237049
with activities often initiated by Manu (Toby), as the dogs and cats met their various needs for exer-
cise and for food and water, which needed to be supplied from the imaginary kitchen.
Manu (Toby) initiated what became a collective enterprise. Children were welcome to enter the
play even if they were not a dog or a cat. All of the children who wanted to participate, even at
varying degrees, joined in without too much effort. In this game, children exercised their rangatira-
tanga (self-determination) and civic identity, acting as a group for the benefit of the group’s overall
health. All of the participants were able to contribute to the collective enterprise. They made
decisions about who needed exercise first and who needed Band-Aids and how the fetching
game would work. The dual honouring of both agency and participation is evident in this vignette.
These elements of civic action – civic identity, civic deliberation, collective enterprise and shared
concern – are part of everyday living of young children when they are able to use their agency to
influence and even control how and what they are learning.
The collective acti on of the children being animals and then entertaining and caring for one
another is not the development of civic action, but the actual doing of civic action. They are caring
for one another. They are compromising, making collective decisions, identifying as a group, welcom-
ing diversity and sharing concern. Using examples from children across the sites of our international,
comparative ethnographic project – Civic Action and Learning with Young Children – we hope to
demonstrate that seeing play as a political time and space rather than as an act of development
allows us to recognize and value children’s doing of civic action. Rather than seeing young children
as developing civic action attributes, we will argue with examples and theory that children are doing
civic action, that they are concerned an d committed (right now) to collectivit y. Play is the most
common (an d endangered) time and space in which children act for the collective.
Play as a political space that supports the serious work of civic action
Ethnographic research across the world describes how children organize play agendas, find play part-
ners, resolve disputes, source and construct their own materials, and socialize younger children into
the rules, goals and agendas, while adults are on the periphery or even out of sight (Hayashi & Tobin,
2011; Bock, Gaski ns, & Lancy, 2008). We argue that it is in this free unstructured time (with reduced
teacher direction) tha t children have agency to demonstrate and enact their civic capabilities and to
respond to what is happening in a collective, rather than an individualistic, way.
The allocation of time and space where children have free choice is often labelled as play. When
children govern themselves during this time and space, their acts are often seen as apolitical. And yet,
children are actors within structures, institutions and communities that shape and are shaped by poli -
tics. Indeed, through the philosophical lens of Rancière (1991), even the exercise of an infant learning
to express herself through language demonstrates her political agency, her intersubjective assertive-
ness, in articulating her intentions and communicating her feelings, desires, intentions and needs
within the space she shares with others (Rancière, 2010b ). A young child’s early experimentation
with communicating is viewed as reflecting a liberatory intent, described as ‘stepping into language
with all the force that is entailed in any political encounter of the emancipatory sort’ (Bingham &
Biesta, 2010, p. 59).
Often children advocate for themselves and others in contexts labelled as ‘play’. We suggest that
the free choic e times often known as ‘play’ can be seen as sites of political engagement. In accord-
ance with Rancière’s(2010a) definition, politics is about counting ‘a part of those without a part’
(p. 36). In the origins of citizenship and democracy in Ancient Greece, only wealthy men counted.
Women, children and slaves were not included as citizens. And so, Rancière defines politics as the
claims made to count those who are not counted, as witnessed through, for example, women’s
rights, race rights, working-class rights, children’s right s, disability rights, asylum-seeker rights and
lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans or intersex rights movements. Young children are typically not recognized
as political beings, nor as bearers of politicalness. They are rarely (if ever ) heard in public debate.
Parents and early childhood educators listen to children, but it is unclear whether young children
EARLY CHILD DEVELOPMENT AND CARE 799
are engaged with as political beings. This study documented many examples of children acting as
political beings, as those who actively seek to count ‘a part of those without part’, who may be
excluded through ruling demarcations instated by educators, state or nationa l policies, or by children
who devise and assert their self-made rules. For example, we see children welcoming others into their
play regar dless of what animal or human form they entered in as and adapting games for newcomer
participation as enacting civic agency and as acts of collective concern.
Also, part of being political is being able to initiate concern, change and collectivity as a citizen
who can initiate action in the polis – a place of coexistence with others, many who may be
unknown. Arendt’s(1958, 1998) theory of human action offers a useful definition that is workable
for young children. To Arendt, action is beginning something new in the world, public realm or
polis, outside of our internal and personal spaces. Early childhood settings are, for many children,
their first entry into the polis (a community of unk nown others) (MacNaughton, 2007), thereby offer-
ing space for children to do civic action. The impulse for action comes from wanting to begin some-
thing new and emerges unexpectedly from what has happened before. Action differs from routine
actions (such as eating, washing and cleaning), which consume most of our day as these are
either work or labour. Actions do not exist in isolation: instead, ‘they fall into an already existing
web where their immediate consequences can be felt’ (p. 184). In Arendt‘s theory, actions are recog-
nized as affecting others, yet the effect is invariably not what the initiator intended because of con-
flicting wills and intentions in the web of human relationships in the polis. If an initiator tries to
control how others respond to his or her action, or if individuals block others’ opportunities to
begin, agency is denied (Arendt, 1998; see also Biesta, 2010). Arend t advocated for worldly care
for the public realm, where initiated actions are enacted with consideration for others. This under-
standing of action seemed workable in possibilities for young children’s civic action through the rec-
ognition that young children would be motivated to begin something new in response to what they
see, feel and hear in the early childhood setting.
By seeing play as a space for civic action, children are viewed as political through their capacity to
initiate and respond to others in ways that support the initiatives of each other. Actions then involve
responsive interaction with others through the interplay of doing, saying, listening and waiting. Such
interactions welcome plurality and difference in that children’s initiated actions ‘are taken up by
others in unprecedented, unpredictable and uncontrollable ways’, as noted by Biesta (2010,p.9)
in his proposal of Arendt’s theory of action for political coexistence in democratic education.
In this article, we combine Rancière and Arendt’s ideas of political agency to notice children’s influ-
ence, decisions and acts in the public sphere of their early childhood education and care settings. We
see children’s collective efforts to count those who are not always counted as civic action and we
used this understanding to make sense of what children often do during play, particularly the
initiation of acts for the common good. We recognize that it is the context of child-directed play
that provides the greatest opportunity for young children to exercise civic action as political agency.
Play, civic action and collectivity
Our ideas about civic action stem from a communitarianism approach (Delanty, 2002) to defining and
framing what civic action capabilities might be for young children. As a citizenship theory, commu-
nitarianism is focused on families, commu nities and cultural groups (rather than the state and
economy), which form the polis that children have access to and are included in. Of particular interest
in communitarianism is how people act in groups – group action. In our study of civic action and
young children in different nat ional, cultural and linguistic spaces, we sought to examine child-
initiated group action in early childhood settings.
There are two specific principles of communitarianism (e.g. see Delanty, 2002; Etzioni, 1993;
Monro, 2005) that guided our approach to civic action as a collective act by children. First, social cohe-
sion and interrelatedness are developed through compassion, care and concern for fellow commu-
nity members and responsibility to the community. For example, on numerous occasions we
800 J. K. ADAIR ET AL.
witnessed at all three sites young children comforting or helping another child so that they could
rejoin the community activities. Second, social practices and values only have meaning within the his-
torically developed social fabric of societies and cultures and are not isolated in just one moment. As
witnessed at the Aboriginal Australian site, the cu ltural value and practice of ‘looking out for your
mob’ are known and enacted by young children through getting extras (e.g. lolly (candy) or even
a handful of sand) for your kin. This act of collect ivity is as political as it is historical because
young children are acting against decades, centuries even, of oppressive acts that try to destroy
their affection and care for one another. Often in our work in all three countries, we saw practices of
children’s acts as responses to not just what was in their immediate classrooms or outdoor preschool
spaces, but as responses to serious collective concerns that burden their families and communities.
The civic action and learning study
The Civic Action and Learning with Young Children study is a video-cued, comparative ethnographic
project in three countries: New Zealand, Australia and the US. In each country, research teams have
been working within an educational setting that serves communities who are politically underrepre-
sented. In New Zealand, we are working with an early childhood education and care setting that
serves Maori and Pacific Islander families. New Zealand is unique in our study because they have
the least restricted space for children and they have the only bilingual/bicultural curriculum that
attempts to privilege the values and language of Maori communities. In Australia, we are working
with an Aboriginal Australian community formed a century ago through the government and mis-
sionaries’ horrific forced relocation of 35 tribes and removal of children from their families, decimat-
ing dozens of languages and communities. In the US, we are working with a large city preschool that
primarily serves Latina/o and African-American communities. The preschool teaches in both Spanish
and English. Each of the three sites is explored in greater detail before each country’s discussion of
civic action and play. Included in these descriptions are the national/local understandings of play as
well as the political standing of play in each country.
Data collection in three countries
Our study began with developing relations hips with respected community members and educators
at each site. We met with administrators, teachers and families to get to know them and their needs
from us as researchers. We explained the study and sought their input on our data collection plan as
well as how permission might be sought for observing and filming children. After the sites agreed to
participate, we met with educators and families to seek permission, explain our study and answer
questions.
After permission was granted, we spent eight to twelve months in each site collecting data through
participant-observation and taking consistent field notes. All of the researchers participated in daily
classroom life with children’s activities and were available much like a teacher’s assistant to help
with whatever children or educators needed. Usually we watched children until invited to participate
by them in a game, art project, dramatic activity or shared concern. We were eventually treated as part
of the community and blended in easily to everyday life. When children and educators were familiar
and comfortable enough with us in their space, we began to film and take pictures of daily civic
action examples. We looked for children working together, including one another, having conflict,
excluding others and caring for one another as well as caring for plants and animals. This resulted in
substantial field notes, video recordings and photographic examples of children doing civic action.
While participating, observing and recording civic action in each site, we also interviewed the edu-
cators, community members and children using the video as a cue for discussion. For example, we
showed the children video footage of themselves working together to get their responses. Children
enjoyed watching films of themselves and their classmates. They also enjoyed watching films of chil-
dren in other sites. We also showed educators scenes we filmed in their own classrooms for thei r
EARLY CHILD DEVELOPMENT AND CARE 801