Childhood Innocence for Settler Children: Disrupting Colonialism and Innocence in Early Childhood Curriculum

ABSTRACT

This article explores the challenges of rewriting prescriptive early childhood curriculum wherein settler colonialism and childhood innocence as a discourse reinforce one another. We attend to two primary ideas: 1) that the presence of settler colonialism pervades everyday practices in the early years, and 2) early childhood curriculum maintains young children’s innocence vis-a-vis the regulation of their knowledge of colonial violence and Indigenous dispossession. By examining the curricular revisions of one pre-service teacher, we highlight the tensions that educators may undergo in negotiating the violence of U.S. settler colonialism within classrooms with young children.

Acknowledgments

We’d like to thank the editors and anonymous reviewers for the thoughtful provocations that guided a revision of this work. We would like to acknowledge Haeny Yoon, Tran Templeton’s co-principal investigator on the project from which the data for this article were collected. We are also thankful for Marquita Foster, a doctoral student at the University of North Texas who assisted in initial exploratory coding. Finally, we would like to note that this article is a joint paper in which both authors contributed equally.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.