Critically Literate Citizenship: Moments and Movements in Second Grade

Abstract

With renewed emphasis on civic education in K–12 schools, educators and politicians call for young people to engage in civic action. Worth considering are the kinds of ideas taken up, the performances deemed critical enough, and actions recognized in schools as civic engagement. Drawing from a case study of second graders in New York City (NYC), I move away from hypervisible expressions of civic participation to show how children take up critical literacy and civic action through everyday, ordinary moments. Beyond public displays of social action, how do we build up critically literate citizens who question, disrupt, and engage civically in their daily lives? Highlighted throughout this article are children’s questions, inquiries, and tensions around diverse identities and practices (e.g., religion, race, gender, politics). In centering children’s political agendas, I argue that the production of civic engagement is lived out in the curricular, conversational, and playful moments leading up to social movements.

Writing Rights to Right Wrongs: A Critical Analysis of Young Children Composing Nationalist Narratives as Part of the Larger Body Politic

“…Decades of scholarship illuminate how discourse and encounters within and beyond the walls of classrooms influence young children’s civic understandings and actions (Hauver, 2019; R. Hess & Torney, 1967/2006; Vasquez, 2004; Yoon, 2020). As Swalwell and Payne (2019) state, even though children “are not adults with concomitant rights and responsibilities, children do have an array of human and civil rights that make them civic beings” (p. 128).…”

“…I joined in CSJ events (i.e., technology night, community fair) and off-campus activities (i.e., field trips, field day). As much as possible, I tried to engage as a humanizing researcher (Paris & Winn, 2014 ) by envisioning my role as a coresearcher, coteacher, and coplayer in ways similar to other early childhood scholars (Wargo, 2021;Yoon, 2020).…”

“…Those that did typically focused on older elementary children and middle schoolers for shorter periods of time (Caffrey & Journell, 2019; Payne & Journell, 2019; Yoder, 2020). Likely, this is because most adults rarely view young children as “young people” interested in activist work, arguing children are too naive for such endeavors (Yoon, 2020).…”

Scoping the field of literacy research: how might a range of research be valuable to primary teachers?

“…Janks, 2013) and occasionally extends it. Yoon (2020), for example, drew on her ethnographic study to foreground how critical literacy and/or civic action arose in ordinary moments in everyday classroom life while Wynter-Hoyte and Smith (2020) outline how a teacher and researcher collaborated to disrupt a colonized early childhood education curriculum by teaching from an Afrocentic stance.…”

Raising Critical Readers in the 21st Century: A Case of Assessing Fourth-Grade Reading Abilities and Practices

“…To the best of our knowledge, there are no existing assessments or resources available for assessing metacognitive engagement (i.e., making personal or experiential connections with textual media that include critical reasoning) with multimodal texts. Grounded in the understanding that there is no such thing as a socioculturally or ideologically neutral text (Street, 2014), we aimed to develop an approach for gauging students’ ability to question and even push back on potential bias in texts, shifting the role of textual resources from an authoritative position to one of multiple potential voices and stances in need of careful, critical review (Jewitt, 2005; Yoon, 2020). Further, we aimed for this new assessment to be more culturally inclusive, noting the constraint of English as the medium of printed content.…”