Children as Citizens

Engaging with the child's voice in educational settings

Pauline Harris, Harry Manatakis

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781138669833
• eBook ISBN: 9781134685189
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book discusses how consultations with young children could signal a change of thinking about how children might influence policy and shape the development of a child-friendly state. While the consultations in this study were germane to political decisions, they took place as multi-modal dialogue with children in their educational settings. Framed by Australia's national early years learning framework which focuses on children's belonging and identity, the consultations saw unique partnerships formed among children, educators, families and policy officers, providing ways in which children's voices may be engaged in educational spaces throughout the world.

Using a qualitative case study approach, these consultations were documented through observations, interviews, artefact collection and document analyses, allowing the authors to construct a framework for engaging children as citizens that is transferable to a variety of settings.

Chapters provide:

• an insight into the various aspects involved in children's consultations from conceptualizing and planning consultations with young children, to implementation and documentation, through to the uptake and consequence of children's messages;

• factors that contribute to the effectiveness of consultations, challenges that arise, and areas for improvement when engaging with children's voices;

• implications for children's participation as valued citizens and a framework for considering young children's voices in decision-making processes.

This book offers fresh ideas for working with young children in the decision making process and will appeal to early childhood researchers, educators, policymakers and practitioners across various sectors, agencies and disciplines.

Chapter 1

Engaging with children as valued active citizens

No one is born fully-formed: it is through self-experience in the world that we become what we are.

Paulo Freire (1921–97)

Children are citizens of today and bearers of human rights. They are social actors, agents in their own lives, with the right among others to be active participants in decisions that affect their lives (United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, 1989). But what do these assertions mean for how children learn to engage as valued active citizens, and for how early childhood educators view and engage with the child?

These questions comprise the key focus throughout this book, which reports on a study of consultations with young children (three- to eight-year-olds, with a small number of older children aged nine to twelve also included), about their views of their local communities to inform a government’s state strategic plan. These consultations were conducted in partnership with experienced early childhood educators in their education and care settings. Children’s and educators’ documented experiences of these consultations provide valuable insights into engaging with the child as social actor, active participant – as valued citizen.

Child as citizen

In a democratic society, ability to have a voice and participate in influencing public policy and social determinants within the community, are central tenets of citizenship. These central tenets hold true when their associated practices are authentic, non-tokenistic in nature and able to influence change in a way that is reflective of a broad representation of society’s views.

However, in Australia – the national context of this book’s project – the Child Right’s NGO Report stated that ‘mechanisms for involving children in decisionmaking … are poor … Australia does not follow best practice for finding out and incorporating the views of children’ (Listen to Children 2011 Child Right’s NGO Report Australia Executive Summary, p. 3).

In more global terms, the Committee on the Rights of the Child’s General Comment No. 7 (2006) noted insufficient attention given to young children as rights holders, and reaffirmed ‘that the Convention on the Rights of the Child is to be applied holistically in early childhood, taking account of the principle of the universality, indivisibility and interdependence of all human rights’ (UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, 2006, p. 62). In this reaffirmation, the Committee sought ‘recognition of young children as social actors from the beginning of life’ (UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, 2006, p. 61).

Acknowledging young children as social actors brings our work into the realm of the new sociology of childhood (Noble-Carr, 2006). Children are viewed as competent human beings, key informants and experts on their own lives with views they express with wisdom and insight – indeed, our best source of advice for matters affecting them (Mac Naughton et al., 2008). Recognising children this way shapes the relationships we develop with young children and how we engage with them as citizens not only on public matters in the civic sphere, but on matters in children’s everyday lives and settings.

Such engagement, however, has not been without its obstacles and counterarguments against engaging children’s voices (Hallett and Prout, 2003). While some would question young children’s capacity for such engagement, and others may doubt the age appropriateness of such action, there are still others who question adults’ right to search for children’s points of view (Eide and Winder, 2005, cited in Rhedding-Jones et al., 2008).

It has been further noted that perceived benefits of engaging with children’s voices are usually defined by adults and not children (Bishop, 2009). These benefits include opportunities for experiencing and learning about participation and inclusion in democratic and day-to-day processes; valuing and validating children’s views, developing children’s competencies for participation, contributing to decision-making processes and influencing change (Wise, 2009). However, as Bishop (2008) argues, there is need to spend more time understanding what constitutes benefit from children’s (and young people’s) perspectives.

A key conclusion of the 2012 ‘Child in the City’ Conference in Zagreb was the reminder that children’s rights in their entirety are human rights, and noted ‘that the right to participate sometimes dominates the agenda, with disproportionate time and effort expended on developing representative structures and bodies for children’s “voices” to be heard’. We had two observations about this:

A.	That working with relatively well-off children in forums of young democracy should not take priority over working for all children’s most basic rights to safety, shelter, food, love and the freedom to play.
B.	Participation work should avoid aping adult institutions. Children should rather be enabled to participate fully in their lives as children, communicating and exercising their own agency through their own mediums of play and movement as much as being listened to when they speak.^1

These challenges create opportunities for re-framing our thinking and transforming our practices – as policymakers and educators found themselves doing in engaging with children’s voices as reported in this book. In this space, we do not view children’s basic rights and freedom to play to be contradictory with children’s right to be heard in decisions that affect their lives. But we do pay heed to the need for balance among children’s rights – and the importance of play in young children’s lives.

These challenges highlight the complexity of children’s participation, rights and citizenship. We need to learn from this complexity so that we might improve our understanding and practice in relation to more fully realising children’s rights and citizenship, as comprehensively documented across a range of approaches in diverse contexts around the world (Percy-Smith and Thomas, 2009).

The tension that resides in the challenges we’ve identified here, it seems, concerns children’s right to be children. Part of being children, of course, is being human, and recognising young children’s citizenship in the here-and-now. In approaching matters related to young citizenship – such as engaging with young children in consultations to inform decisions affecting their lives – we need to be mindful of how children express their citizenship in ways that are part and parcel of how they act in and with their world. We return to this dilemma to explore it further later in the chapter.

Before we do further explore how we engage with young children as citizens, we need some clarity about what citizenship actually means in a democratic society, which is the political context of this book. Definitions of citizenship abound, including the legal sense of being citizens of one’s country of birth, with all the rights that go with that particular constitutionally defined, politically demarcated and geographically bound citizenship. A legal recognition of citizenship alone, however, does not equate to meaningful or valued citizenship – it does not capture the deeper implications of what it means to be a citizen, such as what it means to belong and be included because one is a citizen, and the relationship between citizenship and rights, citizenship and wellbeing (Ben-Arieh and Boyer, 2005).

A strictly legal definition of citizenship might rest comfortably with the notion of children as citizens from birth for those holding traditional views of early childhood (Alderson et al., 2005). However, such a definition does not capture the essence of what it means for a young child or infant to be an active citizen – defined by Isen and Turner (cited in Phillips, 2011, p. 784) as ‘being a social agent expressing opinions, making decisions, and enacting social actions as an expression of civic responsibility’.

Inherent in the notion of child as active citizen from birth is recognition of the child as competent: ‘children can be seen as citizens, from their earliest years, because they are able to express ideas and wants and to contribute to decisionmaking that affects them’ (Nutbrown and Clough, 2009, p. 196).

However, is active citizenship simply expressing civic responsibility by expressing ideas, opinions and wants that contribute to pertinent decision-making processes? There are those who argue from a Freirean perspective that active democratic citizenship involves participating in the world in order to transform it, with a sense of social justice and self-awareness of one’s presence in the world in relation to others. As Brett (2007, p.1) has argued:

Discourses centring around concepts such as ‘participation’, ‘empowerment’ and ‘active democratic citizenship’ are widely used in education but can easily be misappropriated by the New Right – and/or indeed ‘New Labour’ (cf. Ledwith, 1997). Participation with an emphasis upon duty, and without political drivers, can collapse into an unproblematic conception of active citizenship as volunteering.

This note of caution is a timely reminder that children’s engagement with civic decision-making processes – a practice often seen to be the hallmark of children’s active citizenship – can only be significant if conditions are in place that endow children’s participation with authenticity, meaning and consequence – conditions that at the same time foster children’s learning about what it means to be valued active citizens.

Translating findings into policy or practice is a major aspiration of engaging with children as active citizens. There have been indications, however, that while there is clear enthusiasm for children’s participation, evidence of change as a consequence of children’s participation is less apparent (Fitzgerald and Graham, 2009). That being the case, there is a need to interrogate if and how children’s participation is working in children’s favour, and to understand the implications for children’s sense of participation and citizenship when their views are sought but not taken up in any substantial way that makes a difference to their lives (Dockett, 2009; Wise, 2009).

Nurturing children’s active citizenship

As Freire (1983, p. 72) has written, people – adults and children alike – are ‘beings in the process of becoming – unfinished, uncompleted beings in and with a likewise unfinished reality’. It is through experience in the world that we become who we are. It follows, then, that what children experience as citizens shapes who they are and who they become as citizens. Therein lie significant implications for how we engage and interact with children in our early childhood settings. As Taylor et al. (2008, p. 196) have maintained, citizenship is ‘learned and practiced in the contexts of family, school and community social participation … and it is likely to be through social relationships and processes in society that children come to understand citizenship’.

Therefore, as Percy-Smith (2010, p. 109) has provocatively argued, opportunities need to be provided for young children

to participate more fully in everyday community settings – home, school and neighbourhood – through the actions, choices, relationships and contributions they make, rather than being preoccupied with participation in political and public decision-making processes in organisations and systems which are removed from young people’s everyday lives.

Returning to our earlier dilemma of balancing listening to children with their rights to play and exercise agency in their everyday worlds, we now explore conditions that nurture young children’s sense and mobilisation of self as active citizens in their everyday contexts, and endow their participation with authenticity, meaning and consequence. The practice often referred to as ‘consulting with children’ to inform decision-making in any authentic, meaningful and consequential way requires dialogue in the Freirean sense of the word – a conversation space in which children and adults come together in dialogue in and about the world. As Freire (1983, p. 124) compellingly wrote:

Some may think that to affirm dialogue – the encounter of people in the world in order to transform the world – is naïvely and subjectively idealistic. There is nothing, however, more real or concrete than people in the world and with the world, than humans with other humans.

Such dialogue involves an awakening of participants’ consciousness of their presence in the world ï an awakening that Freire (1983) referred to as conscientisation that he further explained:

A humanising education is the path through which men and women can become conscious about their presence in the world. The way they act and think when they develop all of their capacities, taking into consideration their needs, but also the needs and aspirations of others.’

(Freire and Frei Betto, 1985, pp. 14–15)

Such encounter provides opportunity to explore what it is to be a child in the world and what it means for a child to be an active citizen (Sommer, Samuelsson and Hundeide, 2010) – and more, what it means, as this book explores in chapters to come, to be educators and policymakers engaging with children’s voices and participation in a democratic society.

Such encounter also affords opportunity for children to reflect on and live their lives from what Coady (2008, p. 12) has called the inside:

Humans of whatever age need to live their lives from the inside according to their understandings of what makes life valuable, and be able to use the resources of their culture to assess these values in the light of whatever information and examples and arguments their culture can provide … Even very young children are in the same process of learning and of evaluating their beliefs about what makes life worthwhile, even while they are very dependent on their families and others around them for input and guidance.

Well might we consider, then, examples we wish to set young children about what it means to be an active citizen. We call on Freire’s notion (1983) of the dialogic encounter to frame children’s participation as active citizens – that is, dialogue between people in, with and about their world, giving rise to the identification of participant’s thematic ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: the Children’s Voices Project
• 1. Engaging with children as valued active citizens
• 2. The inquiry into the Children’s Voices Project
• 3. Planning to engage with children as active citizens
• 4. Children make their voices visible through visual arts in Limestone Town
• 5. Children see themselves in a new frame through photography in an Eyre and Western community
• 6. Children weave their desires into a shared vision for their Fleurieu community
• 7. Children express their views through music, drama and play in a Western Adelaide community
• 8. Authentically documenting children’s messages
• 9. Reporting and uptake of children’s messages
• 10. Final reflections on the Children’s Voices Project
• References
• Index