Rocking and Rolling. Supporting Curiosity and Inquiry in Early Social Studies
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Authors’ Note:
Some style guides, including NAEYC’s, suggest using capital letters for both Black and white when referring to racialized groups. Drawing from legal scholar Neil Gotanda (1991), whose thinking was heavily influenced by Kimberlé Crenshaw, we lowercase white when describing the racial category to disrupt the term’s historical racial domination, while capitalizing terms like Black and People of Color, which have deep political and social roots.
Two-year-old Amelia and her classmates are outside coloring with chalk with their teachers, Ms. Dee and Ms. Vivian. Looking from her beige skin to Ms. Dee’s sienna-colored skin, Amelia says, “Your knees are brown.” Laughing, Ms. Dee says, “Yes, they are.” Ms. Vivian adds, “Her skin is beautiful, isn’t it?”
Amelia nods, then looks at Ms. Vivian’s knees and her own. “We’re white,” she notes.
Both adults smile, and Ms. Dee laughs again as Ms. Vivian says, “Yes, we’re white people. Our skin is a lighter color.” Amelia nods and goes back to coloring.
Amelia is learning about phenotypical differences and her own racial identity. She is making assumptions about categories of people within her community and the differences between them. This is just one example of the ways that even very young children engage in social studies by learning about themselves, their communities, and the world around them.
For infants and toddlers, social studies learning occurs as part of their everyday explorations. Crawling up a hill or feeling grass for the first time helps our youngest citizens learn about landforms and the geography of their world. A tussle over a toy is the beginning of understanding about resource scarcity and how people meet their needs. A teacher’s gentle scaffolding can model the civic practice of defining and negotiating a rule. Learning to anticipate routine experiences like naptime or meals is the beginning of children’s learning about time, and therefore history.
In this article, we (the authors) explore what social studies looks like in infant and toddler settings and how early childhood educators can prepare the learning environment and cultivate experiences to support social studies learning in the very early years.
Big Ideas in Early Social Studies
In its position statement on social studies in early childhood (Vilotti & Berson 2019), the National Council for the Social Studies describes how young children explore and ask questions about social studies in their play, daily experiences, and interactions, using both verbal and nonverbal cues. In our work, we have identified five components of equity-centered social studies that recognize these capacities in young children, including infants and toddlers:
- Early childhood social studies, like all learning in the first three years, spans all domains of development. In other words, early childhood social studies is transdisciplinary rather than taught in isolation from other content areas like math and science.
- Early childhood social studies should acknowledge the reality of children’s lived experiences and the inequities that exist in daily encounters.
- Young children are knowledgeable and capable, and their ideas should be taken seriously.
- Young children need real, meaningful experiences involving inquiry.
- Educators need not invent problems or scenarios for young learners to solve. There are plenty of real dilemmas that children encounter.
These components are grounded in theory and research related to social studies and young children. They help inform the strategies, activities, and materials educators use to foster social studies knowledge and skills—during the earliest years and beyond.
Learning About Ourselves and Others
Infant and toddler settings are rich spaces for learning together about identities, cultural traditions, and histories through hands-on explorations and experiences. Young children’s identity development is tied to exploring differences and similarities—in their bodies (e.g., Katz & Kofkin 1997), what they can do, how they communicate (DeJesus, Liberman, & Kinzler 2019), their relationships, and their shared memories with people, groups, and places (Johnson & Peterson 2019; Iruka et al. 2021). The purposeful environment should offer them an example of an inclusive, accessible space (Kuh 2014).
Choosing diverse books and other materials helps infants and toddlers learn about themselves and their communities, particularly when these have rich, meaningful connections to children’s cultures and everyday experiences (Cooper & Quiñones 2022). (See "Social Studies Literature to Consider," below, for examples of books that build on early social studies concepts.) For example, hanging multiple mirrors at children’s height and providing art materials that represent a variety of skin colors allow young children to explore the similarities and differences in their physical appearances. This promotes a sense of belonging at school (Beloglovsky & Daly 2018; McMullen & Brody 2022).
Engaging with items that represent a wide array of cultures and ethnicities also supports children’s development of symbolic thinking and creates opportunities for children to explore aspects of the social world through play (Beloglovsky & Daly 2018). Dramatic play centers can include items from a range of communities and cultures, such as baskets, printed oilcloth, lids to canning jars, mortars and pestles, and other cooking utensils that connect with children’s home and community contexts and from around the world. Loose parts for older toddlers can include big buttons and yarn, oversized nuts and bolts, or wooden mallets and dowel rods. These should connect in real ways to the experiences that infants and toddlers have at home, such as helping to make tortillas, fixing a toy, or caring for family members.
Children and teachers can explore and engage in cultural practices together. For instance, Lees (2023) described a unit in a 12- to 24-month-old classroom in which children and teachers learned about the ancestral practices of making oars through storytelling and sensory exploration. Early learning programs and schools can partner with families and the local community to learn more about what cultural traditions, lessons, and ideas are important to pass on to young children (see Kaomea, Alvarez, & Pittman 2019).
Building Upon Children’s Curiosity
Infants and toddlers often express curiosity about new materials or experiences by observing, manipulating, or reaching for objects; asking questions; or trying out ideas and theories (Engel 2015). Supporting their curiosity leads to important conversations and experiences about the social world. For instance, children may reach out to touch someone’s assistive technology, like a cochlear implant or a wheelchair. Teachers can scaffold this discovery by providing simple, direct information: they may explain that Ahmed’s cochlear implant helps him hear, then say, “We can’t touch it, but we can look at it.” Teachers may also share books or dolls with other examples of assistive technology to help children understand how people use different tools to meet their needs.
Teachers can encourage curiosity about identities by describing differences and similarities as well as by offering new ideas and vocabulary. In the opening vignette, for example, Ms. Dee and Ms. Vivian could have introduced race-related vocabulary like melanin and Black to help Amelia learn the words people use to describe themselves or to talk about their histories (Nash et al. 2017). Teachers can also introduce descriptive language to describe skin colors: “My skin is dark brown. Your skin is lighter brown, isn’t it? But we are both Black.”
Exploring Equity and Fairness
Infants and toddlers explore social systems and structures through observation and interaction with the world around them. In their daily lives, they pay keen attention to differences and similarities (e.g., Hirschfeld 2007; Bussey 2011), and they work hard to make sense of ideas related to equity and social justice, such as fairness (Lee et al. 2021). Through play, children may try out ideas about society related to gender roles and expression, racial prejudice, labor, or differing abilities. They may experiment with who “gets to be” different roles in pretend play, such as only offering babies to the girls in the housekeeping center. Educators should directly acknowledge behaviors that reinforce biases and help children think through alternatives they can enact together, such as encouraging boys to take on a caregiving role or taking turns cleaning up.
Learning About and Exploring Culture and History
The songs, stories, and fingerplays that we share with infants and toddlers are important introductions to oral history, cultural heritage, language, and literacy. From variations of “The Itsy Bitsy Spider” to fingerplays common in Latin America like “Pon Pon” and “Bate, Bate, Chocolate,” these songs and their accompanying movements teach vocabulary, numeracy, rhythm, and phonological awareness while also engaging children in culturally relevant traditions. Nursery rhymes exist in all cultures, and educators can be intentional about sharing examples from across the globe and that are linked with children’s own home and community contexts. Similarly, having music and musical instruments from various genres and cultures exposes infants and toddlers to a range of musical traditions. The Smithsonian Folkways children’s collection is an excellent place to start, as are YouTube channels like Gracie’s Corner, Super Sema, and Disney Jr.’s Rise Up Sing Out.
For infants and toddlers, early historical awareness begins as they become aware of routines and as their growing memory allows them to reflect on or connect to past experiences (Friedman 2008). Educators can acknowledge an infant’s anticipation of routine events by responding with questions such as “Are you ready for lunch?” or noting, “You’re right, it is time to go outside.” They can help toddlers build an understanding of time through conversations that reference this morning, yesterday, and tomorrow. Children also learn about history through shared memories and stories with their loved ones.
Toddlers are capable of engaging in basic historical thinking practices (Arias-Ferrer, Egea-Vivancos, & Levstik 2019). Historical thinking is the process of using critical thinking skills to evaluate and analyze primary source documents to learn about the past (Salinas, Blevins, & Sullivan 2012). For infants and toddlers, the best primary sources are photos and artifacts that they can explore using their senses. Toddlers learn their personal histories by exploring family photos, short videos, and artifacts like baby blankets or toys. Questions such as “What do you see in this photo?” and “Tell me about this video” invite children to use their observational skills to gather and share evidence using a primary source. They also begin to build a sense of historical time by retelling stories (“We used to be in the baby room”; “When Baba was little”).
Teachers may choose historical artifacts related to lessons and children’s interests. For instance, in a setting where children often make pretend phone calls, teachers could bring in old phones for children to examine and play with.
Learning to Care for One Another and the World Around Us
Equity-focused social studies recognizes infants and toddlers as “having the ability to make a valued contribution to society now, and in the future,” as Te Whāriki authors noted (Betts et al. 2018, 8). In other words, infants and toddlers have and are developing skills for contributing to their communities (Astuto & Ruck 2010) and learning about the world around them.
Toddlers, for example, often spontaneously engage in collaborative caregiving practices, both in real and pretend ways (Cooper & Quiñones 2022): they comfort crying peers, eagerly help clean up with child-sized dustpans or clean cloths, and assist with mealtime routines. Shared materials in infant and toddler settings (blocks, art supplies, dramatic play props) encourage collaboration and create opportunities for children to learn how to navigate shared resources. Encouraging and enabling these early civic actions set the stage for children to care for one another and their environment and to continue working with and for their communities as active citizens (Payne 2018; McManus & Colegrove 2023).
Teachers play a big role in children’s first civic experiences. Adults regularly model ways that we make decisions with and on behalf of the community, like turning off lights to help babies nap or working together to clean up a mess. We also model important social and community values like consent by asking a child’s permission before picking them up and by respecting a child’s “no” whenever possible (Gerbert 1979; LaMonica 2022).
Introducing Geography to Young Children
Early geographic experiences include developing spatial awareness by manipulating toys and materials as well as exploring different landscapes through daily experiences. Teachers can support young children’s geographic awareness by using spatial vocabulary (in, on, next to, above, below) and noting landmarks (“Yes, that’s the paletero that sells mango paletas” or “That’s the park where we play soccer”).
It is also important to emphasize our relationship to the land and the resources in our communities. Young children are curious about the environment, noting its changes and growth. To promote their geographic knowledge and thinking, children need time and opportunities to engage at length with the world around them. Consider documenting how a nearby tree changes over the learning year. Likewise, taking walks and cultivating gardens or other shared outdoor spaces can nurture a deeper connection to the land and spark curiosity about children’s relationships and histories with the natural world. In one toddler classroom, children’s questions about composting trucks led to an inquiry about composting and an opportunity to teach others about caring for the environment (Kenyon & Lampe 2020).
Conclusion
As the study of the social world, social studies is ever-present in the lives of children. This is especially true for infants and toddlers as they are increasingly exposed to people, places, and things for the first time and are learning to navigate friendships and differences. By leveraging the natural curiosity that our youngest learners possess and forefronting children’s cultures, questions, and interests, educators can offer a wide range of equity-based opportunities to learn about social studies principles every single day.
Think About It
- How do you see the very young children in your setting exploring social studies ideas like identity, community, culture, history, and caring for our needs and our spaces?
- How do children and their families see themselves in your classroom or program space and activities? What do the families and communities you serve want their youngest members to know about their cultures?
- How are children able to engage in inquiry about themselves and others in your setting? How can they practice caring for their communities?
Try It
- Partner with families to share a simple object or photograph related to their children’s experiences and interests; for example, a baby shoe or a photo of their home. What do children notice about it? What are they curious about? What can they tell you about this object?
- Identify a social studies topic from this column that was most compelling to you, and plan one way you can build this concept into your daily routines and learning experiences.
- Consider what resources you could use to help children explore our social world by sharing, learning about communities and cultures, and/or caring for others. Select one set of resources and explore how children respond to them.
Rocking and Rolling is written by infant and toddler specialists and contributed by ZERO TO THREE, a nonprofit organization working to promote the health and development of infants and toddlers by translating research and knowledge into a range of practical tools and resources for use by the adults who influence the lives of young children.
Social Studies Literature to Consider
Editors’ Note: Early childhood educators choose books each day to share with the children in their settings. Besides broadening children’s experiences, these books can also expand educators’ own knowledge and understandings of our diverse social world. As part of the book selection process, educators must think about the social and cultural contexts of the children, families, programs, and communities they serve. They can explore a range of diverse children’s texts as they consider and reflect these contexts. The sampling of books presented below may contain titles that educators are not yet familiar with and that they may want to consider as they broaden their collections.
Our article “Supporting Curiosity and Inquiry in Early Social Studies” considers how social studies learning occurs in the everyday lives of infants and toddlers, offering a range of ways that educators can engage young children in cultural practices as well as in various social studies disciplines like history and geography. Here, we extend these ideas by sharing books specifically for infants and toddlers that can launch conversations about people, places, and events that may be both familiar and unfamiliar to young learners.
Using diverse literature with infants and toddlers helps support children’s positive identity development while also building emergent literacy skills (Gardner-Neblett et al. 2023). Offering a playful, equitable approach to early social studies requires intentional planning and decision making, including the selection of children’s books. For early social studies experiences, we recommend board books with photographs because they deeply engage infants and toddlers and encourage curiosity about the peoples of the world. We encourage educators to choose a variety of texts written in concise, direct vocabulary and featuring language appealing to infants and toddlers.
The books listed below are just a few of the many board books that have been recently published and that feature primary sources, depictions of diverse cultures and traditions, and histories. Educators looking for additional board books to try out with infants and toddlers may wish to follow accounts such as The Conscious Kid (@theconsciouskid) or Maya Lê (@maistorybooklibrary) on social media. The Cooperative Children’s Book Center has a recommended book search tool that allows educators to search by age, subject, and content type (https://ccbc.education.wisc.edu/recommended-books/). Teachers can also find recommended social studies books for a wide range of ages on the National Council for the Social Studies’ Notable Trade Books List (socialstudies.org/notable-trade-books).
Books that could start conversations about identities and community values:
- Counting on Community, by Innosanto Nagara, is a counting book that highlights people and events in a community.
- First Conversations series (Our Skin, Being You, Yes! No!, Together, and Every Body), by Megan Madison, Jessica Ralli, and colleagues. These books offer initial concepts about identity and include questions to prompt observation and conversation about differences and similarities.
- May We Have Enough To Share, by Richard Van Camp. This book, which features photographs of families shared on the blog Tea & Bannock, offers a view of community gratitude and care.
- Together, by Mona Damluji and illustrated by Innosanto Nagara, is about the power of collective action.
Books that feature photographs and could serve as primary sources of babies and families engaging in a diverse social world:
- Bye-Bye Ice! Springtime in Alaska, by Carla Snow (see other seasonal titles in this series). This series, created by Alaska Native authors and photographers, shares images and observations from Alaska through the seasons.
- Cradle Me, by Debbie Slier. This book, which is available in Navajo, English, and Spanish, shares examples of the many ways families cradle and care for their babies. It highlights cradle boards from multiple tribes.
- Global Babies series, by the Global Fund for Children. Global Babies and the other books in this series share images of babies from all over the world and highlight the common experiences babies and toddlers have.
- We Are Little Feminists board book set, by Archaa Shrivastav, Brook Sitgraves Turner, and Shuli de la Fuente-Lau. This series highlights similarities and differences in the experiences and identities of young children, including hair, movement, and families.
Books that could introduce aspects of history, cultures, languages, and traditions:
- Crescent Moons and Pointed Minarets: A Muslim Book of Shapes, by Hena Khan and illustrated by Mehrdokht Amini, and the subsequent books in this series celebrate Muslim traditions and cultures through early concepts.
- Cuauhtémoc: Shapes–Formas, by Patty Rodriguez and Ariana Stein and illustrated by Citlali Reyes. This Spanish and English bilingual concept book highlights shapes from Aztec traditions.
- Holi Colors and Diwali Lights, both by Rina Singh, use photographs of babies and toddlers to share traditional Hindu celebrations.
- Little Black Lives Matter, by Khodi Dill and illustrated by Chelsea Charles. This rhyming book features people significant to Black history through verse and quotations.
- Little Leaders series, by Vashti Harrison. This series shares simple biographies of women and People of Color.
- Pride Colors, by Robin Stevenson, is a Notable Social Studies TradeBook for Young People. It shares images and ideas represented in the Pride flag.
Photograph: © Getty Images
Copyright © 2024 by the National Association for the Education of Young Children. See Permissions and Reprints online at NAEYC.org/resources/permissions.
References
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Anna Falkner, PhD, is assistant professor of early childhood education at the University of Memphis. Anna was an early childhood and elementary school teacher in Austin, Texas. Her scholarship centers the perspectives of Children of Color and focuses on young children's socials studies learning, including how children learn about social constructs such as race, community, and belonging. [email protected]
Noreen Naseem Rodríguez, PhD, is an assistant professor of elementary education and educational justice in the College of Education at Michigan State University. She is coauthor of Social Studies for a Better World: An Anti-Oppressive Approach for Elementary Educators. Before becoming a teacher educator, Noreen was a bilingual elementary teacher in Austin, Texas, for nine years. [email protected]