Revisioning Fairness as Social Justice in Early Childhood Education

Young children’s ideas of fairness have been studied in a range of laboratory settings with findings that children see fairness as equal distribution of resources. However, many studies occurred in decontextualized environments (i.e., laboratory settings), which hardly provide opportunities for children to exhibit nuanced ways to enact fairness. By observing children in more authentic contexts, their classrooms, this article complicates the concept of fairness as equality and attends to the ways that children respond to issues of fairness by acting as contributors to their classroom communities on a daily basis. Drawing on a larger video-cued ethnographic research project, we specifically focus on full-day films taken across three early childhood classrooms to contextualize young children’s capabilities when they encounter issues of fairness. The findings indicate that young children have the ability to respond to fairness with social justice-oriented solutions by giving up resources, prioritizing other’s needs, and advocating for others. When children confront issues of fairness in real-life contexts, they are capable of finding solutions that endorse equity.