Hall And Rudkin Summary

Throughout the article written by Hall and Rudkin, they discuss how children comprehend the essential rights and laws in a community. In this article, they tell us adults throughout society promote children’s understanding of responsibilities and rules in their community. Hall and Rudkin (2011) converse about “how to support children as protagonists in communities, that is, actors, agents, and co-constructors of civic life” (p. 52). Along with this, they state that we as society should not hide a world from children in which they are already a part of. This article gives us an example of how children can be apart of the community even in a very small setting. The children attempted to understand what Crystal, the hamster, wanted out of her

community and tried their best to make that happen.
These articles can help enable my understanding of young children in many distinctive ways. I believe that these articles are incredibly important because it discusses not only how children have rights and responsibilities throughout the community, but also why this is important for them. This article discusses many different topics throughout it, but in the end, there are three main points that are made. First, it tells us that if we as adults take the time to actually listen to the children, we can promote deeper thinking and intensify their voices. Secondly, children have very important things to say and if we stop and listen to their thoughts, we may just learn something from them. Lastly, the children in this article realized that with the power of love, they could overcome any step backs involving Crystal’s life and community.
Throughout the article, the authors examined many different ways to involve children in the community as protagonist.

This intrigued me to research more ways to create my future classroom like this and allow children to make their own decisions, while still being able to ask for help if needed. I’m still wondering how and what would be an affective way to approach this. I want children to be able to solve their own problems and make their own decisions, but I also want them to be able to come to me for help. Something I don’t want in my future classroom is for a child to rely on me to make their decisions. I know that Hall and Rudkin (2011) mention that, “the notion that a key role for teachers is to facilitate peer relationships lies at the heart of the concept of supportive social learning, a means of creating caring classroom communities” (pg. 55). I am very interested in how good teachers go about creating a caring classroom community. I’ve recently been observing my mentor teacher and how exactly she allows the children in the classroom to work out their own conflicts and problems. This article makes sense to me because Hall and Rudkin discuss problems and solutions with this classroom idea along with supportive learning and how that affects a classroom. Good teachers will help the children make their own decisions, problem solve, and reflect on several

perspectives.
One powerful quote that stood out to me in this article was, “Respecting children’s rights and autonomy does not mean leaving them to act and decide on their own. It means being available as a support and guide when needed and stepping back to allow children to engage in their own process when possible.” (p. 56) This quote was very powerful to me and will certainly affect my teaching opportunities. I believe that this quote is telling us that children should be able to make their own decisions and solve their own problems, but are also able to ask for help from an adult when needed. Overall, I think these articles gave me a much better understanding of how I could theoretically create my classroom in the future. I will absolutely use this article as a future reference when encouraging my students to be their own person and become a community protagonist.