Moving towards Critical Democracy: Democratic Spaces in the Portuguese Early Years Classroom

In societies where authoritarian and populist perspectives are on the rise, a focus on the concept of democracy within education can provide a meaningful space to reflect critically on, and disrupt, the status quo. In post-dictatorship Portugal, democracy has become a central symbolic concept within education policy and, in particular, Early Childhood Education (ECE) policy emphasises the importance of democratic citizenship within children's personal and social development. Through a lens of critical pedagogy, we examine the diverse enactments of democracy at the classroom level within ECE settings in Portugal. By analysing interviews with twenty early years educators in three kindergartens, we identified ten concepts of democratic educational practice. Through observation of their classrooms, we explored divergent applications of these concepts in practice which embodied three distinct pedagogical approaches, which we termed instructive, responsive, and synergetic. These respectively enacted three styles of classroom democracy, which we described as procedural, interactive and critical democracy. We found that "critical democracy" was most evident where collaborative democratic spaces were created by educators who emphasised and enacted the values of listening, critical thinking, freedom, and respect.