Theoretical rationale
Listening to children
What counts as meaningful expression or a valuable idea from a child? Adultism controls children’s voices according to adult standards, making those voices all too easy to erase.
Adultism refers to the ways adult authority can subordinate children’s agency to have their own perspective and participate in decision-making (Rollo et al., 2020). In schools, adultism can appear when adults unilaterally decide in advance what children are ready to know, which topics are appropriate, and which should remain outside the classroom, without listening to children’s perspectives and experiences. It also appears when children’s knowledge is valued only when it fits adult-approved forms: clear speech, rational explanation, or formal participation.
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This matters because children do not always express their social understandings in ways that adults immediately recognize as meaningful. Yoon and Templeton (2019) show that children’s stories often appear as “narrative fragments”: small, nonlinear, and situated moments that emerge through art, gestures, dance, songs, writing, or spontaneous questions. These fragments may reveal how children are making sense of a world in which gender, sexuality, belonging, exclusion, and relationships are intertwined.
In gender and sexuality-related moments, adultism can make these fragments especially easy to dismiss. A child’s curious question, a drawing, or gendered hateful language exchanged among peers may be dismissed as a mistake, a misunderstanding, or inappropriate wordplay. However, these moments show that children are already encountering social meanings and prejudices in their everyday lives. The issue is whether adults are willing to listen when children’s existing questions and experiences surface.
This is why parent communication is central. When teachers fear complaints, they may feel pressured to shut down children’s fragments before they become visible. The semester letters and Question map help teachers explain to families that listening to children is not the same as imposing adult agendas with a political purpose. Rather, it is part of taking children seriously as social beings whose questions, relationships, and experiences deserve educational attention.
This lens helps teachers recognize how easily children’s questions can be dismissed when adults control the boundaries of what is considered appropriate. The toolkit therefore helps teachers protect the pedagogical space needed to listen to children while communicating clearly and professionally with families.