Session Information
25 SES 01, School Stages and Transitions
Paper Session
Contribution
In many countries early childhood education has an explicit responsibility to provide an environment in which human value and dignity are respected. Against this background, early childhood education has been studied as an arena for young children’s human rights. This paper explores ways in which human rights become part of and affect young children’s everyday practices in early childhood education and, more particularly, how very young children enact human rights in the preschool setting. The focus is accordingly on the children and their actions. The specific research question is: How do children aged 1-3 enact human rights in the preschool setting?
Rights research in early childhood education has largely centred on children’s right to participation (eg., Bae 2010, Hudson 2012, Dunphy 2012), and a significant body of knowledge on this theme is available. However, there is a need to widen the lens and to approach early childhood education as a site for children’s rights in new ways. It can further be noted that rights-oriented research on children under the age of three is very limited, and also that few studies have investigated children’s everyday practices and lives from a rights perspective. This paper aims to contribute to the knowledge about rights in the lives and experiences of young children.
This research is theoretically informed by a combination of human rights theory and childhood sociology. Human rights thinking has evolved successively over time, expanding both the scope and the subjects of rights (Bobbio 1996). The first rights – civil rights – served to guarantee personal freedom and to recognise the individual as sovereign. Rights to political participation – political rights – came about after the establishment of the initial civil rights, and even later were economic security, social welfare, education and health care declared as socio-economic human rights (UN 1948). However, the emergence and expansion of human rights for children has had another trajectory. In this paper, rights theory provides an approach and a vocabulary that defines rights for children as human rights.
Childhood sociologists (James, Jenks, and Prout 1998; James and James 2004) highlight how previous views of children tend to objectify the child: the child is understood as an object for natural development (psychological perspective) or socialisation (sociological perspective), thereby directing the interest towards what the child will become. The sociology of childhood rejects such futuristic conceptions of the child and contrasts with the argument that children are active, creative social subjects who are shaped by and shape their circumstances and the surrounding society (James et al. 1998; James and James 2004; Quennerstedt and Quennerstedt 2014). The sociology of childhood theoretically strengthens the claim that children are legitimate holders of human rights in the present.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Bae, B. 2010. “Realizing children’s right to participation in early childhood settings: some critical issues in a Norwegian context.” Early Years 30 (3), 205-218. Bobbio, N. 1990. The Age of Rights. Cambridge/Malden: Polity Press. Dunphy, E. 2012. “Children’s participation rights in early childhood education and care: the case of early literacy learning and pedagogy.” International Journal of Early Years Education 20 (3), 290-299. Eldén, S. 2012. “Inviting the messy: Drawing methods and ‘children’s voices’.” Childhood 20 (1), 66-81. Hudson, K. 2012. “Practitioners’ views on involving young children in decision making: Challenges for the children’s rights agenda.” Australasian Journal of Early Childhood 37 (2), 4-9. James, A., C. Jenks and A. Prout. 1998. Theorizing Childhood. Cambridge: Polity Press. James, A. and A. James. 2004. Constructing Childhood. Theory, Policy and Social Practice. Hampshire/New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Komulainen, S. 2007. “The Ambiguity of the Child’s ‘Voice’ in Social Research.” Childhood 14 (1), 11-28. Mazzei, L. and A. Jackson. 2012. “Complicating Voice in a Refusal to ‘Let Participants Speak for Themselves’ ”. Qualitative Inquiry 18 (9), 745-751. , Quennerstedt, A & Quennerstedt, M. 2014. “Researching children’s rights in education: sociology of childhood encountering educational theory.” British Journal of Sociology of Education 35 (1), 115-132. Quennerstedt, M.;Öhman, J. and Öhman, M. 2011. “Investigating learning in physical education – a transactional approach.” Sport, Education and Society 16 (2), 159-177. , Raittila, R. 2012. “With children in their lived place: children’s action as research data.” International Journal of Early Years Education 20 (3), 270-279. Spyrou, S. 2011. “The limits of children’s voices: From authenticity to critical, reflexive representation.” Childhood 18 (2), 151-165. Warming, H. 2011. “Getting under their skins? Accessing young children’s perspectives through ethnographic fieldwork.” Childhood 18 (1), 39-53.
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