Revisiting diversity and difference in early childhood through children’s news media

Abstract

Children’s access to certain knowledge, often deemed inappropriate for children by adults, has been at the core of many controversies in children’s early education. This is particularly the case in terms of the censorship associated with children’s access to what has been broadly viewed as ‘difficult knowledge’ – bodies of knowledge pertaining to sexuality, death, war, poverty, and violence, for example. In some western countries, the discourse of childhood innocence has been a powerful mediator/regulator of children’s access to knowledge and has influenced how children are viewed as active citizens in their everyday lives (Robinson, 2013). However, it is now more widely accepted that children are competent, knowing beings in and of the world, readily taking up, processing and challenging messages about a raft of uncomfortable and inequitable realities, from global warming, to sexism, to racial intolerance, to class prejudice (Osgood et al., 2016). This view of children and childhood requires that approaches to pedagogy, policy and practice around diversity and difference in early childhood education attend to children as knowers and doers in the world (Osgood, 2012; Osgood and Robinson, 2019; Robinson and Jones Diaz, 2016).