Annual Report 2003, Hamburg
The network for "Research on Children's Rights in Education" is a new EERA network.
It was established at the EERA Executive Council meeting in Glasgow in May 2003.
In the introduction to the rationale of the proposal, the authors of the proposal stressed that: “Assuming that fundamental human rights is an important set of morally and legally binding conditions that regulate basic principles of a relationship between the individual citizen and the state, and that children’s rights present a part of the corpus of human rights, it is quite obvious that there is a number of issues at the intersection of children’s rights on one hand and education on the other that are very well worth of attention of a researcher in education.”
The proposal was supported by Marie Parker-Jenkins (England, UK), Ingeborg Moqvist- Lindberg (Sweden), John I'Anson (Scotland, UK), Donald Christie (Scotland, UK) and Zoran Pavlovic (Slovenia).
Since the network was established too late for organizing own events at the ECER 2003 in Hamburg and to be in a position of accepting and reviewing papers, we gladly accepted a kind invitation on the Network 4 (Inclusive education) to organize a joint session, so we submitted our papers to be reviewed by that network.
In Hamburg, we had a short working meeting where the network actually met for the first time on Wednesday, 17 September evening. The joint session with network 4, “Realizing Children’s Participation Rights” took place on the next day, 18. September. Five papers were presented. The session was quite well attended in spite of the sharp competition of the other interesting parallel sessions and the participants were quite pleased with the successful launch of the new network. Zoran Pavlovic also attended two convenors’ meetings during the course of the ECER as a representative of the network.
Because of “children’s rights” as a broad, integrative and generative concept, we expect to do a lot more networking and cooperation with different other networks in the future. The concept is certainly overlapping with a number of issues that are represented in the older networks, but we tend to see it as a virtue and not a handicap of the new network, that simply wishes to emphasize the children’s rights aspect of those issues. It is however ready to also organize special conference events and publications with particular and specialized focus on the children’s rights in education, which – the education – we believe to be the basis of successfully consuming children’s and human rights in a democratic society.
Zoran Pavlovic,
Ljubljana, Slovenia,
December 2003.