Using ethnographic data from 10 months of observations in nine preschool classrooms, I examine gendered sexual socialization children receive from teachers’ practices and reproduce through peer interactions. I find heteronormativity permeates preschool classrooms, where teachers construct (and occasionally disrupt) gendered sexuality in a number of different ways, and children reproduce (and sometimes resist) these identities and norms in their daily play. Teachers use what I call facilitative, restrictive, disruptive, and passive approaches to sexual socialization in preschool classrooms. Teachers’ approaches to gendered sexual socialization varied across preschools observed and affected teachers’ response to children’s behaviors, such as heterosexual romantic play (kissing and relationships), bodily displays, and consent. Additionally, my data suggest young children are learning in preschool that boys have gendered power over girls’ bodies. I find that before children have salient sexual identities of their own, children are beginning to make sense of heteronormativity and rules associated with sexuality through interactions with their teachers and peers in preschool.
This article offers an expansive conceptualization and examination of young children’s experiences of school discipline inequalities, which includes the variety of behavior management approaches (i.e., punitive discipline and positive discipline) that preschool teachers differentially use in response to students’ behavior (e.g., noncompliance). I draw on data from ethnographic observations in three preschools (nine classrooms total) with different racial and socioeconomic classroom compositions. I find that teachers’ varying approaches to behavior management for students from particular racial, gender, and socioeconomic backgrounds (i.e., low-SES girls and middle-class black boys) contributes to children’s hierarchical identity groups within preschool classrooms: “good kids” vs. “troublemaking kids.” Specifically, the messages children at Imagination Center received from teachers’ differential disciplinary responses to low-SES girls’ behaviors, and the messages children at Kids Company received from teachers’ differential disciplinary responses to middle-class black boys’ behaviors, shaped their understandings of whom they should or should not associate with. The findings reveal how school-level disciplinary practices/cultures (e.g., positive discipline rather than punitive discipline) can help to alleviate disciplinary inequalities apparent in some preschool classrooms. Additionally, these data illuminate how preschool teachers’ differential approaches to behavior management affect some marginalized students’ experiences of discipline inequalities as early as preschool.
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