Exploring social justice awareness in young children's shopping pretend play at ECEC settings and museums

This article aims to provide insights of social justice awareness in young children's pretend play (2-6 years old) involving shopping activities in the nursery and the children's museum. Previous literature acknowledges the importance of grocery exhibits and relevant learning centres in the cognitive and socio-cultural development of children, but rarely addresses broader social justice issues. Educators' narratives were analyzed using the Capability Approach to examine how children's play experiences relate to Nussbaum's central human functional capabilities. Thematic analysis indicated that interactions associated with payment transactions and budgeting concepts, healthy eating and consumerism, as well as cooperation in running the shop were instrumental in facilitating social justice awareness and developing a great variety of the central human capabilities. The nursery environment seemed to enable a more agentic stance and a stronger understanding of social justice-related issues, while practitioners' prompts and an implicit pedagogical agenda towards active citizenship enriched play-based pedagogy with social justice objectives.