Promoting Children´s Participation Rights And Pupil Participation In Primary Education

Author(s):

Daniel García-Pérez(presenting / submitting)Ignacio Montero

Conference:

ECER 2014

Network:

25. Research on Children's Rights in Education

Format:

Paper

Session Information

25 SES 12, Participation: Contexts and Perceptions

Paper Session

Time:

2014-09-05

09:00-10:30

Room:

B034 Anfiteatro

Chair:

Ian Munday

Contribution

The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, in the article 12.1, stated that “States Parties shall assure to the child who is capable of forming his or her own views the right to express those views freely in all matters affecting the child, the views of the child being given due weight in accordance with the age and maturity of the child.” This recognition of children´s voices in their own life has reinforced the debate on the importance of pupil participation in our schools. As actual citizens with participation rights, children and young adults should participate in the everyday activity of their schools (Devine, 2002; Osler & Starkey, 1998).

There is no agreed definition of pupil participation, so we have to explain briefly how we conceptualize this term. We consider that pupil participation is composed by three processes that make pupils become authors of their own education. These processes are the following: dialogue, decision-making and action. Using dialogue, the members of the educational community discuss, share and negotiate ideas, affections and points of view about different issues concerning them. After dialogue, there must be a genuine decision-making process in which young and adults have a real influence over the final decisions (Mager & Nowak, 2012; Santos Guerra, 2007). Later, some actions must be initiated to execute the agreements and decisions made (Puig, Martín, Escardíbul, & Novella, 2000) and it may be necessary to revise and get back to the previous steps. We think that these concepts give us some keys to analyze and promote pupil participation. However, we are aware that this theoretical analysis is too much linear. In practice, relations among dialogue, decision-making and action are more complex; it is not easy to distinguish the three processes and they can be related in different ways.

Once we have defined participation, we must turn to analyze the state of the art. Although many European countries recognize the relevance of pupil participation in their educational policies and legislation (see Eurydice, 2005) it seems that the reality of our schools does not correspond to it. Different researchers, in different countries and with different methods, have concluded the same: the experience of pupil participation is severely restricted. For instance, in Portugal, Pedro and Pereira´s research (2010) in two public schools showed that 61% of the students do not have class meetings and it reported weak pupil participation in representative positions and in the associative function of the school. In Ireland, in a sample of 10,334 students aged between ten and 17, only 22.5% of them reported having some kind of participation in the rule-making of their schools (de Roiste, Kelly, Molcho, Gavin, y Gabhainn, 2012). In her review of the research in France and Great Britain, Pagoni (2009) concluded that the establishment of instances of participation seems to be ineffective in the consolidation of democratic dialogue at school. Thornberg’s ethnographic studies in Sweden (Thornberg, 2009; Thornberg, 2010; Thornberg & Elvstrand, 2012) provide us with a final conclusion: in our schools pupil´s voices are suppressed and their opinions are devalued.

Both the relevance of pupil participation and the lack of it in our schools lead us to the general question of the present research: how can we promote pupil participation at school? If we want to implement children´s participation rights at school we must know how to do it. Thus our aim is to analyze good practices of pupil participation to illustrate how it can be managed. To achieve this objective we have conducted case studies of Spanish Primary schools in which pupils participate.

Method

We carried out a qualitative case study (Stake, 1995/1998) of two public Primary Schools located in the Madrid area, Spain. We selected these cases using purposeful sampling (Merriam, 2009) with three criteria. First, the cases had been reported in the literature due to their democratic culture. Second, we could appreciate in our first meeting with the staff that the schools had some relevant participatory practices (class meetings, student council, democratic pedagogies…). Third, the good disposition showed by the staff and the educational community could maximize our learning opportunities (Stake, 1998). We started fieldwork in the first school in September 2009 and we finished it in June 2010 and, in the second, we stayed from February to June 2010. One of us went to each school from one to three days a week. To gather data we used participant observation, in-depth interviews and analysis of the main documents of the schools. As the logic of the study is to illustrate how to manage pupil participation, these techniques enabled us to know and analyze their practices and their oral and written discourse on participation, i.e., what they do and why they do it. In line with this aim, the process of making sense of data was mainly inductive, though we did use some theoretical terms and categories to inform our analysis and interpretations. To analyze data, we classified, categorized and conceptualized (Woods, 1986/1998) separately the information of each case and then we made a cross-case analysis. In this way we could attend to the specific elements of each school and the common themes. Throughout the process we used three tactics of triangulation (see Stake, 1998) to reduce misinterpretations and wrong representations. During the analysis each researcher drew its own conclusions and we compared, contrasted and discussed them. Using methodological triangulation we checked if the information collected by the different techniques was coherent. We validated our report using member checking as well; we presented an earlier draft of the report to the teachers and we arranged a meeting to discuss it.

Expected Outcomes

We consider we have fulfilled our aim of illustrating good practices of pupil participation. Since our results consist in detailed descriptions, in this paper we will just present briefly some of the practices analyzed. First, our cases have made special efforts in the design and the promotion of pupil participation structures at the classroom and the school levels. The class meetings and the student council provide a place and a time in which pupils can manage important matters concerning them. The former assures the direct participation of every student in some important issues: collective rule-making, dialogic conflict resolution and the preparation and evaluation of activities and events of the classroom. The later, composed by rotatory representatives of each classroom, manages the same kind of issues at the school level. Both structures keep a continual flux of communication and information. We have also analyzed and illustrated participatory teaching methods of the cases such as project pedagogies and work plans. These methods involve pupils in a dialogue in which they have to defend their own points of view and listen to their peers and teachers. Furthermore, they have to make collective and individual decisions about how to organize their work time; they can select some contents, contributing to the construction of the curriculum and they have voice in their evaluation through the introduction of self-evaluation processes. We think our study can make a contribution in the promotion of children´s participation rights at school in two lines. On the one hand, it provides evidence that it is feasible to foster pupil participation in the daily activity of a Primary school and it illustrates how it can be done. On the other hand, it develops concepts and ideas that may contribute to a theoretical discussion on what pupil participation means.

References

Council of Europe (2010). Council of Europe Charter on Education for Democratic Citizenship and Human Rights Education. Strasbourg: Council of Europe Publishing. de Roiste, A., Kelly, C., Molcho, M., Gavin, A., & Gabhainn, S. N. (2012). Is school participation good for children? Associations with health and wellbeing. Health Education, 112(2), 88-104. Devine, D. (2002). Children's citizenship and the structuring of adult-child relations in the primary school. Childhood, 9(3), 303-320. Eurydice (2005). Citizenship education at school in Europe. Brussels: Eurydice. Mager, U., & Nowak, P. (2012). Effects of student participation in decision making at school. A systematic review and synthesis of empirical research. Educational Research Review, 7(1), 38-61. Merriam, S. B. (2009). Qualitative research. A guide to design and implementation. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Osler, A., & Starkey, H. (1998). Children`s rights and citizenship: Some implications for the management of schools. The International Journal of Children´s Rights, 6, 313-333. Pagoni, M. (2009). La participation des élèves en questions. Travaux de recherche en France et en Europe. [Student participation in issues. Research in France and Europe.] Carrefours de l´éducation., 28(2), 123-149. Pedro, A. P., & Pereira, C. M. (2010). Participação escolar: Representações dos alunos do 3º ciclo de Aveiro (Portugal). [School participation: Representations of students of the 3rd cycle of Aveiro (Portugal)] Educação e Pesquisa, 36(3), 747-762. Puig, J. M., Martín, X., Escardíbul, S., & Novella, A. M. (2000). Cómo fomentar la participación en la escuela. Propuestas de actividades. [How to encourage participation in school. Proposal of activities.] Barcelona: Grao. Santos Guerra, M. A. (2007). Arte y parte. Desarrollar la democracia en la escuela [Art and part. Developing democracy at school.] . Sevilla: Homo Sapiens. Stake, R. (1995/1998). Investigación con estudio de casos [The art of case study research]. Madrid: Morata. Thornberg, R. (2009). Rules in everyday school life: Teacher strategies undermine pupil participation. International Journal of Children's Rights, 17(3), 393-413. Thornberg, R. (2010). School democratic meetings: Pupil control discourse in disguise. Teaching and Teacher Education, 26(4), 924-932. Thornberg, R., & Elvstrand, H. (2012). Children´s experiences of democracy, participation and trust in school. International Journal of Educational Research, 53, 44-54. Woods, P. (1986/1998). La escuela por dentro, la etnografía en la investigación educativa. [Inside schools: Ethnography in educational research] Madrid: Paidós.

Author Information

Daniel García-Pérez (presenting / submitting)

Universidad Autónoma de Madrid

Social Psychology and Methodology

Madrid

Ignacio Montero

Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain

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