Child-focused civics: Seeing civic action in young children’s everyday interactions

Schools are tasked with preparing children to become engaged citizens, and yet children already act civically every day. To see how young children in preschool settings do civic action (i.e. acting with and on behalf of their communities), we observed, documented, and analyzed how Black and Latine preschoolers acted civically—without adult direction—in everyday school settings. Through video-cued multi-vocal ethnographic data, we offer a typology that identifies and describes nine primary instantiations of children’s civicness as seen through their civic actions. We ground this typology in sociocultural theories of learning and development, embodied learning, and communal-participatory citizenship. Ultimately, child-focused civicness allows us to see young children’s everyday inclusive, care-driven means to take civic action.