Kidwatching with a critical eye: The power of observation and reflexive practice

Kuby, Candace R. (2011). Kidwatching with a critical eye: The power of observation and reflexive practice. Talking Points, 22(2), 22-28.

It’s one thing to be responsive to children’s experiences of injustice, and to use those experiences as a “teachable moment” to help those children think about injustice in new ways, in hopes that they will not replicate some of the more shameful moments in our nation’s past and (sadly) present. Those kinds of teacher responses are what schooling should be all about at its core. We want to educate children to change the world. It’s quite another thing, however, to use children as a way of working out our own political agendas, and to even try to deliberately stir up feelings of injustice when injustice may not have actually occurred. I think the good kind of responsiveness probably occurred in the vignette Kuby experienced with her five- and six-year-old summer program students, but once in a while as I read, I worried that the line between the good kind of responsiveness and the worrisome kind of deliberate stirring up was dangerously close to being crossed. In principle, I believe in education for social justice, but, oh, how careful we must be with our precious “captive audience”, the young children who are entrusted to our care. Kuby herself appears to have felt some of the same concerns and trepidation that I felt, which is a good sign. She repeatedly asks herself how far she should go with her inquiry into the issue of injustice; such reflection will probably help keep the inquiry in balance.

This was the situation: Kuby’s young students wanted to sit on a bench in the shade outdoors to eat their snack, but were ordered off the bench by teachers, who told them the bench was for adults only. The children were incensed at the order, though they apparently complied. Kuby decided to focus on the incident rather than letting it pass, and tied what happened on the playground to the children’s study of Rosa Parks. Kuby gathered rich qualitative data, and she documents some interesting conversations with the children about segregation and injustice, a few pieces of which are shared with us here. In some ways, using the children’s own feelings was an ingenious way of helping them make those all-important “text to self” connections that help us engage with new learning. Still, the account of all this made me squirm a bit. I’d like to know if any attempt was really made to find out about why the rule about the adults-only bench was made. Could that bench be there to accommodate adults who MUST accompany the children to the playground, but may not be able to get down on the ground and get up from there easily, or who might even have serious physical problems? Could sitting on that bench be not unlike an able person parking in a handicapped spot? As a person who lives with an ongoing physical challenge myself, I sometimes simply must sit down, and heat makes things worse for me. What would I do if I HAD to sit down, I could not go inside, and young children were sitting on that bench, the only seat available in the shade except getting on the ground, which would be hazardous for me? Although Kuby’s discussions with the children included some thinking about who might have made the rule (some of the children said God did!), I can’t tell if anyone really tried to answer the question. A more proactive form of inquiry would have the children researching the background of the rule to find out its roots, then using that knowledge to formulate solutions to the problem (maybe finding a way to build some more kid-friendly seating in the shade?). Why couldn’t this turn into a lesson on compromise, collaboration, and problem-solving? Did it really have to become a lesson about injustice? Certainly schools have issues of power, and children DO experience and witness injustice. I’d just want to be sure that it really was a case of injustice, and that all avenues for solving the problem had been explored.