Discourses of children's citizenship in early childhood settings: A cross-national perspective in the global context

This study responds to recent calls for greater attention to young children in citizenship studies and to the shifting conceptions of young children’s citizenship. As a cross-national analysis, it contributes to a regional and global focus on, and conversations about, young children’s citizenship and pedagogical affordances in early childhood settings. It further explores the movement of global discourses of young children’s citizenship through national curriculum policies in China and Aotearoa New Zealand, and into early childhood settings where young children learn and exercise their citizenship.

The research design has adopted a poststructural orientation and employed qualitative, comparative and ethnography-informed approaches. Michel Foucault’s notion of discourse, power and subject have been used as the main theoretical devices to attend to the multiple truths of children’s citizenship and power relations in early childhood settings. In addition, this research has been informed by Kuan-Hsing Chen’s (2010) Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization, drawing attention to the cultural and historical specificity of each local context and different interpretations and practices of young children’s citizenship in China and Aotearoa New Zealand. A Foucauldian-inspired reflexive thematic analysis has been employed to interrogate (i) key curriculum documents and (ii) interviews with kindergarten teachers in both nations, the latter inspired by video-cued ethnography (Tobin et al., 1989; Tobin et al., 2009). The research findings suggest that children’s citizenship is discursively constructed in early childhood curricula as belonging and connectedness, rights and responsibilities, and development and preparation. Teacher participants in both nations pointed out that citizenship is of significant value for young children, and that kindergartens are key sites for children to enact their citizenship.

Four significant ideas emerged from the research findings. First, by illuminating the cultural-historical contingency and contextual specificity of discourses in China and Aotearoa New Zealand, this study argues for a context-specific understanding of children’s citizenship that recognises the syncretism of social, cultural and historical features in different contexts. Second, children’s status and practices as citizens are problematic in both contexts, as multiple techniques of power produce child citizens as ‘docile bodies’. Third, this study offers an alternative position – negotiated citizenship – which recognises the dynamic power relations in early childhood settings, how children exercise power as citizens, and how they take up and extend the possibilities available to them. Last, this study reveals the necessity and meaningfulness of cross-cultural reflexivity in relation to early childhood education and young children’s citizenship.