‘They broke it again’: examining violence against girls in kindergarten

ABSTRACT

Violence against girls in schools is an ongoing problem, even in early childhood education settings like kindergarten. Dominant views of children and play as neutral and innocent have operated to silence the early normalization of violence against girls. In this paper, I examine some of the ways that violence against girls occurs in kindergarten play spaces. I draw on feminist standpoint as a theoretical framework to interrogate play-based learning from the vantage point of girls and illuminate its hidden gendered effects. Analysis of ethnographic data collected in two Canadian kindergarten classrooms revealed that a common form of violence boys enacted against girls involved the destruction of girls’ building work in play. While girls resisted boys’ domination, the daily destruction of their work in play limited girls’ abilities to equally access kindergarten education. The findings presented in this paper call for a re-thinking of play-based learning in kindergarten and specifically for a theoretical shift in early education curricula, policies, and teacher education and development programmes.

KEYWORDS:

• Early childhood education
• critical feminist theory
• gender violence
• play-based learning

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. I draw on Leach and Mitchell’s (2006) theorizations and use the term ‘gender violence’ instead of ‘gender-based violence’ to underscore that gender norms and power dynamics are always present in acts of violence, rather than viewing some acts of violence as gendered and others as not.

2. Protocol #34192.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jessica Prioletta

Jessica Prioletta is an Assistant Professor in the School of Education at Bishop’s University, Canada. Her research engages with critical feminist theories to examine how gender violence, namely violence against girls, propagates and is resisted at the intersections of childhood and early education. Jessica also investigates critical pedagogies for sexuality education as transformative practice in kindergarten education.