Paper Short Abstract:

This paper showcases the ways children navigate a top-down pedagogy on diversity and difference in a ‘superdiverse’ primary school. It considers how an anthropology of childhood can contribute to understanding processes of discrimination, exclusion and resistance that are currently in the making.

Paper Abstract:

This paper showcases ethnographic encounters with young children’s identity politics as they navigate and (re)define the concepts of diversity and difference in a ‘superdiverse’ primary school. In schools throughout the UK, but perhaps especially in cities that can be characterised as superdiverse, it is becoming increasingly common for children to receive a ‘top-down’ pedagogy of diversity that is created for them in the curriculum. This pedagogy encourages children to embrace diversity and respect many ‘types’ of difference. Yet, children are simultaneously bringing together their own understandings at the periphery of this pedagogy, where they may or may not embrace the principles it wants them to have.

The children also demonstrate how an anthropology of childhood can contribute to understanding processes of discrimination, exclusion and resistance by showing how they receive and interrogate educational diversity initiatives that target them. Accordingly, this paper shows the ways children actively engage with dominant and alternative discourses in context of a pedagogy that responds to an increasingly diverse school and population. Through pretend play and artistic activities with an adult researcher, children aged nine to ten spontaneously bring to the surface some of the most contentious matters in schools today: transgender rights, gender equality, gender critical discourses, Black Lives Matter, processes of racial exclusion and more. The children's voices speak to extensive research on how diversity initiatives often do not achieve the inclusive environments and institutional cultures they promote and rather serve to mask underlying power imbalances, especially regarding race and gender.