NW 15 - A: Supporting children’s futures through partnerships

Network
NW 15 Research on Partnerships in Education

Title
Supporting children’s futures through partnerships

Abstract
Empowering students to play an active role in their own learning process has become a fundamental goal in education. Consequently, educational researchers seek ways to make students’ voices heard when working together, which ultimately leads to a special form of partnership between the students and the researcher. Although it may be argued that partnerships are based on equality, student-researcher partnerships are never really even. We are seeking contributions that critically discuss how researchers can establish meaningful partnerships, to consider if or how it might be possible to empower students, and highlight how to acknowledge and address mutual limitations.

The Call
Educational research frequently involves that researchers enter classrooms and observe or directly engage with young people as part of their research activities (Otrel-Cass & Mayr, 2022). Researchers work with questions that puzzle them, and frequently want to hear from those who are supposed to benefit from educational activities, namely students. This is done in varying formats, including surveys or interviews where the researcher and the researched are clearly differently positioned. This positioning should also ensure that children and young people are protected as outlined in the United Nations’ (1989) Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), Article 3. The convention points out the ambiguities of minors through their limited social power and legal status (Thompson, 1992). This protective status has also contributed to children in research being perceived or treated as participants with little voice based on their vulnerability and need to be protected by adults. By contrast, “The right to be heard,” in the 2009 UNCRC General Comment Nr 12 describes children’s participation as the “ongoing processes which include information sharing and dialogue between children and adults based on mutual respect, and in which children can learn how their views and those of adults are taken into account and shape the outcome of such processes” (p. 5).

In this special call by Network 15, partnerships in education we encourage contributors to address the nature of research partnerships in which students and researchers can work together including what ‘partnership’ may actually mean when adult researchers work with students (children or adolescents). Working in partnership with students may concentrate on ways to bring forward and integrate their voice. Fielding (2004, p.306) writes that “the potential for transformation is more likely to reside in arrangements which require the active engagement of students and teachers working in partnership than in those which either exclude teachers or treat student voice as an instrument” and that working with “students as co-researchers cannot succeed without the engagement of students as … makers of meaning”. 

Contact Person(s)

• Kathrin Otrel-Cass, kathrin.otrel-cass(at)uni-graz.at
• Karen Laing, k.j.c.laing(at)newcastle.ac.uk

References
Fielding, M. (2004). Transformative approaches to student voice: Theoretical underpinnings, recalcitrant realities. British educational research journal, 30(2), 295-311.

Otrel-Cass, K., & Mayr, J. (2022). Student-Researcher Partnerships – Uneven Realities. In Partnerships in Education: Risks in Transdisciplinary Educational Research (pp. 195-211). Springer, Cham.

Thompson, R. A. (1992). Developmental changes in research risk and benefit: A changing calculus of concerns. In B. Stanley & J. Sieber (Eds.), Social research on children and adolescents (pp. 31–64). London: Sage.

United Nations (1989). Convention on the Rights of the Child. United Nations, Treaty Series, 1577(3), 1-23.