Notions of student and children’s ‘rights’, ‘voice’, ‘leadership’, ‘partnership’, participatory pedagogies and collaborating with children and young people as ‘service users’, are currently being endorsed and elaborated across a broad spectrum of thinking, policymaking and provision, in Europe and beyond. This is due to a number of factors besides the UNCRC: in many contexts the inherent value of children’s rights may matter less than a sense that participatory pedagogies foster creative competences, dynamism and active citizenship skills amongst youth in ways that deliver national competitiveness and economic advantage. One result, therefore, is the increasing need to move beyond advocacy in considering rights-based pedagogies, projects and curricula. Instead, we need to consider what theoretical and methodological approaches enable us to analyse, locate and understand this increased attention to ideas that once seemed to exist only on the margins of educational practices.  The proposed symposium will draw on emergent perspectives in educational thinking and on new research paradigms to illuminate some key issues in relation to participatory pedagogies that foreground children’s voice or rights. It will ask

• How should we theorise participatory or rights-based pedagogies and their challenges?
• How should we address and research participatory or rights-based pedagogies methodologically?
• How do participatory or rights-based approaches intervene in the existing social relations of schools and other educational institutions?
• What capabilities or capacities are generated by and within participatory practices?
• How can we understand and document learning from participatory or rights-based pedagogies?