Exploring social justice awareness in young children's shopping pretend play at ECEC settings and museums

ABSTRACT

This article aims to provide insights of social justice awareness in young children’s pretend play (2–6 years old) involving shopping activities in the nursery and the children’s museum. Previous literature acknowledges the importance of grocery exhibits and relevant learning centres in the cognitive and socio-cultural development of children, but rarely addresses broader social justice issues. Educators’ narratives were analyzed using the Capability Approach to examine how children’s play experiences relate to Nussbaum’s central human functional capabilities. Thematic analysis indicated that interactions associated with payment transactions and budgeting concepts, healthy eating and consumerism, as well as cooperation in running the shop were instrumental in facilitating social justice awareness and developing a great variety of the central human capabilities. The nursery environment seemed to enable a more agentic stance and a stronger understanding of social justice-related issues, while practitioners’ prompts and an implicit pedagogical agenda towards active citizenship enriched play-based pedagogy with social justice objectives.

KEYWORDS:

• Capability approach
• social justice
• active citizenship
• pretend play
• children’s museum
• play-based pedagogy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Research was approved by the Research Ethics Committee of the University of West Attica (Prot. No. 58739-23/06/2022). All participants were asked (via email and telephone communication) to participate on a voluntary basis, after being informed of the objectives and scope of the research. They also provided written consent, knowing that they have the option to withdraw from the research process at any time.

2 Taking notes forms part of practitioners’ daily pedagogical documentation, a standard practice approved by children’s parents and discussed at times with children as part of the learning process in the nursery (Fleet and Machado 2022). The digital records submitted to the researchers did not contain personal names or the preschool setting’s identification to protect children’s anonymity.