Theorizing children’s rights in education - Calls for a multi -theoretical approach Several researchers have stressed the advantages to use different perspectives within the field of human rights, not in the sense to cover every possible angle, but in order to allow more than one approach to clarify and explain a research problem. Issues of children’s rights are complex and diverse and different theoretical perspectives seem to be needed when formulating and identifying the research problem as well as empirical information. In the presentation I will briefly describe my ongoing Phd-project, Children’s rights and education, and outline and discuss the study’s multi- theoretical approach. One purpose in the study is to problematize and illuminate the complexity within the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and its claim to be universal. Furthermore the study aims to describe two different political, economical, social and cultural contexts and their ways and strategies to interpret and implement children’s rights to and in education. In order to catch the interaction and relation between global, national and local macro- as well as micro perspective is used and Kenya and Sweden constitute the two contexts. Through studying the content in national political documents and school curricula, and how children’s rights to and in education is formulated in ideological as well as practical political terms, a picture will appear which tell us something about conditions for children’s rights in their everyday life in school. The study also focuses children’s views and understandings of their own rights, especially non-discrimination and the right to participation in school. With the intention of mirroring the complexity and the Conventions claim to be universal theoretical approaches from both political science (Bobbio,2000) as well as from the field of law (Brems, 2001) are used. The overarching theoretical approach in my study is to view childhood as a social construction, a construction that depends on the social and cultural context children live in. This approach is supported in the tradition of sociology of childhood (James, et al., 1998). By using concepts and perspectives from this tradition, children’s own experiences and descriptions of rights are emphasized. The theoretical model, cultural politics of childhood (James & James, 2004), which is a synthesis of different perspectives on the child, is used as a framework in the study. The model tries to sort out, the main issues in the research field: how to handle the interactions and relations between commonality and diversity, change and continuity and between structure and agency. In order to describe and explain children’s rights to, in and through education theoretical perspectives from the field of sociology of education is used. Within the research field sociology of education, the use and meaning of school and education are stressed and problematized.

The conclusions are to outline and discuss the study’s multi- theoretical approach through four different theoretical perspectives.