Session Information
08 SES 13, Participation, Learning and Health: Critical Perspectives on Theory, Research and Practice
Symposium
Contribution
Participation of students, parents and communities in schools decision-making is seen pivotal for democracy and school improvement. We emphasize lay participation from an organizational systems’ perspective that has not been discussed extensively in the literature. Schools may pursue participation of different actors for maintaining specific functions and by specific processes. We make use of systems-theory (Luhmann) and organizational theory (Mintzberg; Hasenfeld) to reconstruct the structure of organizations and specificity of schools as professional organizations. Distinguished by membership, reproduced through decision-communication and structured by decision-premises, organizations provide specific prerequisites for participation. Schools on their performance-level connect professionals and users in mutually reinforced relationships of coproduction. On their governance-level (policy and service development) opportunities for lay participation provide the opportunity to engage in innovation towards changing needs and expectations. Four lay roles are elaborated as relevant to the school system: individual user (student), collective users (students), significant others (parents) and lay community. Drawing on systems-theory, people ascribed to these roles may be included in the schools decision-making according to three dimensions: Process/time: inclusion in different phases; factual: their knowledge and experience may become relevant in different degrees; social: they may control the direction of the decision-making process to differing extents.
Method
Search the ECER Programme
- Search for keywords and phrases in "Text Search"
- Restrict in which part of the abstracts to search in "Where to search"
- Search for authors and in the respective field.
- For planning your conference attendance you may want to use the conference app, which will be issued some weeks before the conference
- If you are a session chair, best look up your chairing duties in the conference system (Conftool) or the app.