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

Abstract

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.