Session Information
25 SES 07, Children’s Rights in the Classroom
Paper Session
Contribution
This paper reports some findings from a larger ethnographic study that is concerned with understanding children’s perspectives on their experiences of the classroom. Drawing on the Sociology of Childhood (James & Prout 1997) as a theoretical framework and the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child the study particularly focused on listening to children’s perspectives of their experiences to gain understanding of the nature of six and seven year old children’s participation in a classroom in a market town in England
The paper aims to explore some of the findings that have emerged from the analysis of research conversations about how children make sense of the expectations that teachers place upon them. From the children’s perspectives, these expectations would appear to be predominantly about regulation. Such expectations constitute the regulative discourse, both generally concerning children’s behaviour in and around the classroom and school as well as concerning what children should and should not do-and-be within specific learning spaces. The findings suggest that these expectations have three dimensions(Readings 1996).
- to regulate children’s physical and vocal behaviour,
- shape their relationships others, including the environment and
- organise the particular arrangement of obligations both children and adults should comply with.
From a predominately Foucauldian approach (Foucault 1977; 1984; 1988; 1991), children’s perspectives demonstrate that these expectations are regimes of truth. Collectively, these expectations function as a range of techniques that provide teachers with a set of authorised strategies to exercise power and to shape and regulate children’s ideas, thought and actions. The findings, however do not suggest that these strategies are necessarily forging totally subjected and passive children towards a state of compliance. Rather they also illustrate children exercising some agency and power and some resistance to the power of others. Within the multiple sets of power relations that they experience within the classroom, both amongst themselves and between different teachers at different time of the day and within different spaces, children are likewise tapping into a range of strategies to resist the dominant discourse.
While the motivation underpinning the expectations teachers place upon children apparently has the children’s best interests at heart, they are nevertheless giving rise to a particular tension between teachers need for order and children’s right to express themselves freely. The findings illustrate that the strategies and associated relations that teachers utilise with children limits the children’s right to access their entitlement to participate in all matters that concern them. The findings are also giving rise to a concern regarding the nature of children’s participation were that likelihood ever to arise. Children’s perspectives demonstrate that they understand how they should behave. They likewise understand that schools privilege adult knowledge. This begs the question; whose knowledge would be heard if children were given the opportunity? Would the relations of power that exist in the classroom enable the space necessary to hear children’s voices?
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Dahlberg, G. & Moss, P. (2005) Ethics and Politics in Early Childhood Education (Abingdon, RoutledgeFalmer). Foucault, M. (1977) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (Harmondsworth, Penguin). Foucault, M. (1984) Space, Knowledge and Power, in: P. Rabinow (Ed) The Foucault Reader (London, Penguin), 239-256. Foucault, M. (1988) The Ethic of Care for the Self as a Practice of Freedom, in: J. Bernauer & D. Rasmussen (Eds) The Final Foucault (Cambridge, MA, MIT Press). Foucault, M. (1991) Governmentality, in: G. Burchell, C. Gordon & P. Miller (Eds) The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (Chicago, IL, University of Chicago Press). James, A. & Prout, A. (Eds) (1997) Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood: Contemporary Issues in the Sociological Study of Childhood (London, RoutledgeFalmer). Readings, B. (1996) The University in Ruins (Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press).
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