Traditional conceptions of civic education for young children in the United States tend to focus on student acquisition of patriotic knowledge, that is, identifying flags and leaders, and practicing basic civic skills like voting as decision-making. The Civic Action and Young Children study sought to look beyond this narrow vision of civic education by observing, documenting, and contextualizing how young children acted on behalf of and with other people in their everyday early childhood settings. In the following paper, we offer examples from three Head Start classrooms to demonstrate multiple ways that young children act civically in everyday ways. When classrooms and teachers afford young children more agency, children’s civic capabilities expand, and they are able to act on behalf of and with their community. Rather than teaching children about democracy and citizenship, we argue for an embodied, lived experience for young children.

Using data from an international, comparative study of civic action in preschools in New Zealand, Australia and the US, we consider some of the types of civic action that are possible when time and space are offered for children to use their agency to initiate, work together and collectively pursue ideas and things that are important to the group. We use an example from each country and apply the work of Rancière and Arendt to think about collectivity as civic action in young children's schooling lives. Play, rather than an act itself, is positioned here as political time and space that make such civic action possible in the everyday lives of children. We argue here that play is the most common (and endangered) time and space in which children act for the collective.

Using data from an international, comparative study of civic action in preschools in New Zealand, Australia and the US, we consider some of the types of civic action that are possible when time and space are offered for children to use their agency to initiate, work together and collectively pursue ideas and things that are important to the group. We use an example from each country and apply the work of Rancière and Arendt to think about collectivity as civic action in young children's schooling lives. Play, rather than an act itself, is positioned here as political time and space that make such civic action possible in the everyday lives of children. We argue here that play is the most common (and endangered) time and space in which children act for the collective.

This article describes the use of video‐cued multivocal ethnography (VCE) in the Civic Action and Young Children Study conducted with preschool children in South Texas. We detail how and why we continue to use the VCE method as a process of collective reflection and analysis with participating communities. We also explore how VCE helps us enact our commitment to equity, change, and justice as activist researchers and educators. [Video‐cued ethnography, early childhood education, civic action, school/community relations]

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