Session Information
25 SES 08, Participation, Power and Place
Parallel Paper Session
Contribution
This paper is about the impact of power relations when six and seven year old children participate in a class council consultation that is facilitated by their class teacher. Drawing on emerging findings from a critical discourse analysis of one specific participation event I will explore the nature of social practices that are being employed. This data set is part of a larger ethnographic study that is concerned with understanding children’s perspectives of their classroom experiences and follows on from a previous paper (Lancaster, 2011) where I demonstrated that this specific classroom context is highly regulated and children understood clearly how they should behave. I also showed that children perceived that teacher knowledge was ascribed more status than their own. As a result I was concerned whether the relations of power that exist in the classroom would enable children to express their views freely.
This paper draws upon Freire (1972) and Foucault (1973,1977,1980) as critical theorists that enable a differentiated understanding of participation. Participation, through a Frierian lens is characterised as a right of citizenship and while this influence is evident in the children’s rights movement in England, within the educational settings the notion of participation is particularly elusive. In this context participation is understood through the rhetoric of pupil voice which promotes children as stakeholders of their educational experience. Drawing on the UNCRC, and in particular Article 12 and 13 which ascribes to children the right to express their views freely on all matters that affect them, specific citizenship interventions such as class and school councils promote opportunities for children to increase their influence in matters from which they have been traditionally excluded. Another reading locates participation within guided construction of knowledge; a socio-cultural theory of learning in which teachers and children are actively sharing their ideas and thinking within learning interactions (Wells, 1999; Mercer, 2000; Rogoff, 2003). This representation of participation is concerned with creating a classroom ethos that is conducive to dialogue and exploratory talk (Wells and Ball, 2008). Within the educational context these two readings are inextricably linked; both routinely involve sharing knowledge and negotiating power relations. However, Cook and Kothari (2001), drawing on Foucauldian ideas, argue that participation events take place within limited autonomous spaces and that facilitators of these events tend to lack sufficient understanding of how power operates.
This resonates with the findings that are emerging from my analysis. Despite the institutions benevolent intention to raise children’s status as stakeholders and their rhetoric about offering them increased opportunities to express their views about matters that affect them at school, teacher understanding of participation and a lack of awareness of how power operates in processes of knowledge collection and production, led to a hegemonic practice. In this paper I will explore this finding by focusing specifically on:
- the systems of differentiation that created particular subjectivities,
- the classroom strategies that shaped children's experience of expressing their views
- the institutional arrangements that engendered the particular ensemble of power relations in this specific participatory event
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Cooke, B., & Kothari, U. (2001) The case for participation as Tyranny, in B. Cooke & U. Kothari (eds.), Participation: The New Tyranny? London: Zed Books Ltd. Foucault, M. (1973) The Order of Things: The Archaeology of Human Sciences. New York: Vintage. Foucault, M. (1977) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Foucault, M. (1980) Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings. Brighton: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Foucault, M (1994) The Subject and Power, in J. D. Faubion, (ed), Michel Foucault: Power. London: Penguin. Freire, P. (1972) Pedagogy of the Oppressed (English ed.). Harmondsworth: Penguin. Gee, J.P. (2005) An Introduction to Discourse Analysis: Theory and Method (2nd ed.) New York: Routledge Lancaster, Y. P. (2011) At what cost governance? Children’s emerging perspectives of life in the classroom A paper presented at The European Conference on Education Research, Berlin. Mercer, N. (2000) Words and Minds: How we use language to think together, London: Routledge Rogoff, B. (2003) The Cultural Nature of Human Development, Oxford: Oxford University Press Wells, G. (1999) Dialogic Inquiry: Towards a Socialcultural Practice and Theory of Education. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Wells, G., & Ball, T. (2008) Exploratory Talk and Dialogic Inquiry, in N. Mercer & S. Hodgkinson (eds.) Exploring Talk in School, London: Sage
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