This paper draws upon some of the findings of a research project, Moving Image Literacies, that is currently underway.  The particular focus here is upon how adults exercise children’s rights in views that are expressed and decisions enacted within school spaces.  These expressions, we argue, imply a traditional conception of childhood with its associations as a state of innocence, in need of protection (‘safe spaces’) and the concomitant avoidance of risk (Boostrom, 1998; Prout, 2000).  Childhood is seen as a state of lack as compared with the capacities that adults have to deliberate, decide and act.  This will be illustrated through an analysis of the choice of metaphors and analogies used by adults in relation to childhood.   Whilst the extent to which children have access to ICT in the home varies widely across the UK (Ofcom, 2008), recent work acknowledges that many young people negotiate different semiotic domains (Gee, 2007) and that these afford increased capacities for young people to act within situations of uncertainty (Johnson, 2001). These enhanced capacities imply that childhood is being refigured through these performances and require changes in the ways in which this might be understood.  

Initial data from the research project suggests that teachers tend to underestimate the extent to which young people access these new technologies in home spaces and tend not to acknowledge the literacies that are practiced.  Within school spaces access to new technologies is subject to surveillance in light of the perceived risk of potential harm, given the more restricted understanding of childhood.  The right of the child to be protected is therefore being exercised (by adults) in ways that restrict children’s expression and which fail to acknowledge certain practices that young people themselves identify as part of their own self expression. An article of the UNCRC that was intended to enhance children’s right to expression is being mobilised in ways that restrict this. As a consequence, children have to endure learning practices that mystify, bemuse and alienate them (Lankshear and Kbnobel, 2003).

The paper suggests that only through the development of a ;rights ecology, that both acknowledges these different semiotic domains and associated performances, and the ways in which this potentially refigures states of childhood, will a more inclusive approach be possible, that makes it possible to acknowledge children’s enhanced capacities to act.