Democratic Practices with and for Our Youngest Citizens: Early Childhood Education, Agency, and the Education Complex

Early childhood pedagogy in Australia is founded on rights-based philosophies that promote social justice, democratic communities, participation, and agency of societies’ youngest citizens. There are, however, significant challenges in realising these philosophies and enacting democratic, agentic early childhood education (ECE) for birth to five-year-old children. This chapter presents three research projects, viewed together through a lens of agency and aligned with the education complex (Kemmis et al., 2012), that highlight the interdependent practices of leading, teaching, and researching in Australian ECE contexts. The first project investigated the emergence and development of effective leadership practices and the arrangements that enabled and constrained them. The second project explored educators’ risk-taking practices, aligning with praxis as morally and ethically informed decision-making about what is ‘best’ for children and societies (Kemmis & Smith, 2008). The third project documented infants’ social and emotional communication and highlighted how the research practices helped enable infants’ participation and agency. Though the focus of each study was different, collectively they illuminate interdependent practices of an ‘ECE complex’, and how individual and collective agencies can optimise pedagogy with and for very young children to live well and help create a world worth living in (Kemmis et al., 2014).