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How do children fashion themselves as citizens? How do they make friends, establish belonging and become participatory citizens in a broader society that entitles some and excludes others? This book explores how a group of children and their teachers built inclusive communities and developed pedagogical practices which recognise children´s agency and citizenship. Traditional pedagogies suppressed the engagement with politics in early years education and valorised images of the child as innocent´. This study traces the limitations of this view of children and of authorised early childhood pedagogies. Through a fine grained analysis of children´s interactions, this study uses theory from Butler and Bourdieu to reconceptualise children´s constructions of their identities and their sense of belonging and community. This detailed account of praxis illustrates how a group of educators engaged local politics in spite of the challenges this offered to their positioning of teachers as apolitical, non- interventionist facilitators. Listening to children´s ideas for community is a powerful tool for building democratic strategies and visions.

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Jen Skattebol, Dip Ed (EC), B.Ed., PhD, Social Policy Research Centre. University of New South Wales, Sydney Australia. Research interests: collaborative practitioner research, social inclusion, Indigenous/non-indigenous relationships, young people, low income families with young children.

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