Abstract

This paper reconceptualizes children as already-being-citizens within their kindergartens. Based on Foucauldian heterotopology, it shows what type of heterotopias entangle two and three-year-olds in everyday place-making practices and how they empower to create counter-sites and inhabit learning environments as creative citizens. After a collaborative ethnographic immersion in 16 Chilean public kindergartens during the academic year 2019, findings show three types of heterotopic place-making that enact children’s citizenship: unpredictable movements and wanderings, new ruling artifacts, and serendipitous spatial transgressions. We discuss how these unsettle pedagogical utopias of ECE learning environments and invite teachers’ improvisatory practices for alternative spatialities, and children’s lived citizenship. We conclude by making a social call to recognize children’s lived citizenship implies thinking less as consumers of established educational spaces and more as co-authors and indelible inhabitants of their learning and living environments