Abstract
This chapter presents an argument that commercial environments and activity systems are important contexts in which children learn how to participate and negotiate within social relations of consumption. It challenges the view that young children should be sheltered from participation in consumer culture and presents cases illustrating children’s experiences and meaning-making. The analysis is drawn from two projects. The first, ‘We Love Old Things’, used drama methods to engage kindergarten children in sharing and talking about objects of personal significance. The second, ‘Children as Citizens’, involved kindergarten children in place-based learning through activities such as excursions, map making and model town making.
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Nichols, S. (2018). Commercial Ethnography: What Are Education Researchers Doing in the Mall?. In: Nichols, S., Dobson, S. (eds) Learning Cities. Cultural Studies and Transdisciplinarity in Education, vol 8. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-8100-2_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-8100-2_9
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