Session Information
25 SES 10, Citizenship: Views, Acts and Contestations
Paper Session
Contribution
To what extent are children able to perceive that an order given by an authority is illegitimate? The traditional view of young children’s authority concepts is that young children have a “heteronomous” orientation toward morality (Piaget, 1932/1965). More recent research has shown that young children are far from always manifesting rigid acceptance of adult rules and dictates. They can perceive some teachers’ interventions as unfair (Thornberg, 2008) and are able to evaluate the legitimacy of orders on the basis of considerations of harm and welfare (Damon, 1977; Laupa & Turiel, 1986; Laupa, Turiel, & Cowan, 1995; Smetana, 2006). They judge, for example, that a school principal has the right to tell children to stop fighting but not to allow them to continue (Laupa & Turiel, 1993). According to children, there are demands that teachers should not make – for example, hitting a student or asking them to behave improperly (Yariv, 2009). So, children are able to perceive that a directive is illegitimate but to what extent do they judge they have the right not to obey it? A child might think a certain order is unfair but might feel he/she is obliged to follow it. Children sometimes don’t accept the legitimacy of a command and yet state that it should be obeyed to avoid punishment (Laupa & Turiel, 1986). As children themselves observe, pupils can helplessly obey the teacher even if they don’t agree with their teacher’s orders (Yariv, 2009). Conversely, they could also disobey, not because they think they have the right to do so but for other reasons, in particular because they care for others and don’t want to hurt them. Thus, the most important for them could be caring for others rather than obeying (Gilligan, 1993).
The first aim of the present communication is to study children’s perception of boundaries of teachers’ authority and of their rights to refuse an illegitimate order. How do children think a child ordered to harm another pupil should react? We will examine in particular how children’s judgments about their rights towards authority and their duties towards their peers are articulated. Although there is a growing body of research in a range of cultures, few studies have recently compared children’s perception of teachers as authority figures from different social class backgrounds (Dunbar & Taylor, 1982). Also, research on social representations on children’s beliefs about institutional roles has shown that children’s answers do not vary significantly by age, but rather by the social groups they belong to (Emler, Ohana and Moscovici, 1987). Thus, the second aim of the current study is to investigate, in the theoretical framework of the theory of social representations, (Moscovici, 2001), variations in children’s perceptions about their rights towards teacher’s authority according to children’s positions in the social structure as well as in school institutions (school level of performance). We assume children develop different perceptions of their rights to contest authority figures as a function of their position both in the social structure and in the school world.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Damon, W. (1977). The social world of the child (1st ed.). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers. Dunbar, A. M., & Taylor, B. W. (1982). Children's perceptions of elementary teachers as authority figures. Journal of Social Psychology, 118(2), 249. Emler, N., Ohana, J., & Moscovici, S. (1987). Children's Beliefs about Institutional Roles: A Cross-National Study of Representations of the Teacher's Role. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 57, 126-37. Gilligan, C. (1993). In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development (6 ed.). Harvard University Press. Hare-Mustin, R. T., & Marecek, J. (1988). The Meaning of Difference: Gender Theory, Postmodernism, and Psychology. American Psychologist, 43(6), 455-464. Laupa, M., & Turiel, E. (1986). Children's Conceptions of Adult and Peer Authority. Child Development, 57(2), 405. Laupa, M., & Turiel, E. (1993). Children's Concepts of Authority and Social Contexts. Journal of Educational Psychology March 1993, 85(1), 191-197. Laupa, M., Turiel, E., & Cowan, P. (1995). Obedience to authority in children and adults. In M. Killen & D. Hart (Eds.), Morality in everyday life: Developmental perspectives (p. 131-165). Cambridge, England: Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Moscovici, S. (2001). Social representations: explorations in social psychology. New York: New York University Press. Smetana, J. G. (2006). Social-cognitive domain theory: consistencies and variations in children's moral and social judgments. In M. Killen (Ed.), Handbook of moral development (p. 119-153). Mahwah N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Thornberg, R. (2008). 'It's Not Fair!'-Voicing Pupils' Criticisms of School Rules. Children & society, 22(6), 418–428. Yariv, E. (2009). Students' Attitudes on the Boundaries of Teachers' Authority. School Psychology International, 30(1), 92-111.
Search the ECER Programme
- Search for keywords and phrases in "Text Search"
- Restrict in which part of the abstracts to search in "Where to search"
- Search for authors and in the respective field.
- For planning your conference attendance you may want to use the conference app, which will be issued some weeks before the conference
- If you are a session chair, best look up your chairing duties in the conference system (Conftool) or the app.