Occasional Paper Series #43

Creating Classroom Community to Welcome Children Experiencing Trauma

by Katherina A. Payne, Jennifer Keys Adair, and Shubhi Sachdeva

School as a civic space encourages teachers and students to consider the fundamental question, “How do we live together?” While secondary classrooms may deliberate public policy issues that inform this question (e.g., Hess & McAvoy, 2015), early childhood classrooms afford spaces for young children to negotiate this question through their embodied, everyday experiences. This question is at the heart of social studies education, yet social studies has been increasingly marginalized or pushed out of elementary and early childhood curricula (e.g., Fitchett, Heafner, & Lambert, 2014; Heafner & Fitchett, 2012). As social studies is pushed out, concurrently schools have readily adopted curricula for “social-emotional learning” (SEL).

In early childhood settings, educators often try to support the development of community (a goal of engaging the question of how we live together) through a lens of prosocial development or social-emotional learning. These frames tend to position children as individuals who lack the ability to engage in White middle-class notions of peaceful social interactions and acts of kindness and to encourage schools to take on the responsibility of teaching those predetermined skills (Schonert-Reichl & O’Brien, 2012). The focus on individuality often removes the child from the collective space of the classroom community, as well as takes away their authentic ways of being a community member. Emphasizing remediation of individual behaviors differentiates many social-emotional learning curricula from a vision of civic education that negotiates the question of how we live together.

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About the Authors

Katherina A. Payne is an Assistant Professor of Social Studies Education at The University of Texas at Austin. Her research considers the intersections of civic education, elementary/early childhood schooling, and teacher education and examines the role of relationships, community, and justice to transform classrooms into child-centered, democratic, more equitable spaces. She has conducted qualitative research in urban schools with teachers and children in grades pre-K through 5th grade. Dr. Payne has published in a range of publications including Teachers College Record, Teaching and Teacher Education, Social Studies and the Young Learner, and Young Children.

Jennifer Keys Adair

Jennifer Keys Adair is an Associate Professor of Early Childhood Education at The University of Texas at Austin. As a young scholar fellow with the Foundation of Child Development and a major grant recipient of the Spencer Foundation, she focuses on the connection between agency and discrimination in the early learning experiences of children and immigrants, particularly how systemic deficit, racialized views of families often translate into harsh learning environments that deny children’s agency. Dr. Adair has published in a wide range of journals and news outlets. She has conducted multi-sited, video-cued ethnographic research projects in the United States, India, New Zealand, and Australia as well as throughout Europe.

Shubhi Sachdeva

Shubhi Sachdeva is a PhD candidate in Curriculum and Instruction, specializing in Early Childhood Education at The University of Texas at Austin. Her research interests include global perspectives on childhood, socio-cultural processes in early childhood education and equity and social justice issues in early education. She is currently working on her doctoral dissertation that looks to understand school readiness practices in India. She holds a master’s degree in child development from Lady Irwin College, University of Delhi, India.