ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author explores the kinds of considerations children make about the nature of the civic spaces they inhabit. Primarily, she focuses on children’s sense making about who has power in a given space and their own positions relative to normative and valued ways of being. She introduces readers to Ella, an active four-year-old girl who struggles to meet her needs against great odds, and then turns to Curtis, a 4th grader, and his experience navigating a school space where his identity as a low-income African American male makes him “other.” She closes with a discussion of trends across data sets and why they ought to concern us.
