This paper is a contribution from the research project “Democracy, Participation and Inclusive Education in Schools” (EDU2012-39556-C02-02) a three year long research started in 2013. This paper focuses on the research of the second year project to find out what kind of learning activities are provided in each school to improve democracy and how pupils experience their participation.

We would like to outline how they value their participation in school in order to contrast the vision between teachers and pupils. The main focus during the second year project is to analyse the student’s point of view because we want to see how inclusion and equity in schools are experienced throughout their  views about participation.  

A fully democratic society guarantees dialogue, critical analysis, the ability to contribute and the involvement of everyone’s decision-making process and, in addition, those whose have recently migrated. According to Biesta & Lawy (2009: 7) “young people learn at least as much about democracy and citizenship – including their own citizenship – through their participation in the range of different practices that make up their lives.”  Consequently, according to Fielding (2011) and Silva Dias & Menezes (2013), children and adults are recognized as active participants, as co-authors in a process of intergenerational learning, as critical and reflective citizens in the school context.

Fielding (2011) and Barbosa (2000) asserted that learning democracy is not only limited in the specific curricular spaces for citizenship education but also, like Dewey (1916) and Apple and Beane (1997), school can be an excellent participatory and learning environment to have different sorts of experiences, throughout the school structure. Edelstein (2011) argued “learning democracy” consists of a variety of interconnected tasks: 1) learning about democracy in order to become a conscious and democratic actor in future situations, 2) learning through democracy by participating in a democratic school community and 3) learning for democracy including the construction of ongoing development of democratic forms of life.  

However different findings pointed out the difficulty to have democratic experiences at school. Biesta & Lawy (2009: 21) said: “many young people continue to regard school as a non-democratic institution suffused with rules and regulations. There is some evidence to suggest that this has served to only emphasize the lack of control and ‘felt’ agency of young people over significant portions of their lives” or Guerin et al. (2013:427) stated: “the feasibility of a participative approach to citizenship education has been questioned through theoretical and empirical critical analysis. On this basis, we suggest that the scope of the citizenship education curriculum should be reconsidered or that teacher and head teacher should receive the necessary and adequate training, and support to implement such a participatory structure”.

From this perspective, the research aims to understand and contrast different perspectives about participatory and democratic experiences from teachers and pupils.

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