Promoting Children's Rights in European Schools explores how facilitators, teachers and educators can adopt and use a dialogic methodology to solicit children's active participation in classroom communication. The book draws on a research project, funded by the European Commission (Erasmus +, Key-action 3, innovative education), coordinated by the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Italy, with the partnership of the University of Suffolk, UK, and the University of Jena, Germany. The author team bring together the analysis of activities in 48 classes involving at least 1000 children across England, Germany and Italy. These activities have been analysed in relation to the sociocultural context of the involved schools and children, a facilitative methodology and the use of visual materials in the classroom, and engaging children in active participation and the production of their own narratives. Each chapter looks at reflection on practice, outcomes, and reaction to facilitation of both teachers and children, drawing out the complex comparative lessons within and between classrooms across the three countries.

‘Children’s Rights, Educational Research, and the UNCRC’ provides international perspectives on contemporary issues pertaining to children’s rights in education. The global context, relevance and implications of children’s rights, educational research and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) are explored from multiple perspectives. Since the development of the UNCRC over 25 years ago, significant changes have occurred in the way that children’s rights are considered, conceptualised and enacted. Even so, there remains a continued debate surrounding the extent to which the children’s rights agenda is embraced within education, as researchers, teachers and other educational professionals continue to consider the degree to which the UNCRC informs practice. This book provides critical and focused discussion on the challenges of enacting children’s rights in educational research contexts and alerts readers to the ways in which children’s rights provide a provocation to think and practise differently. Chapter contributions from scholars in Australia, Finland, Portugal, Sweden and the United Kingdom provide diverse contexts from which subsequent educational and research practice can be derived. Each chapter problematises different aspects of children’s rights within the context of educational research with both broad and specific wide-ranging implications and provides examples of different ways that these aspects are considered in practice.

This book analyzes children's agency as interactional achievement in formal and informal contexts of education and illuminates how agency can be encouraged and supported in these educational contexts. Taking a sociological approach, the author deals with children as social agents rather than learners and considers structures of interaction which encourage and support agency, rather than teaching. The book draws from field research conducted over more than twenty years in a variety of Italian and international contexts. This book is unique in providing a theoretical reflection on the social structures that can support children’s agency, as well as a large amount of examples which show how these structures and agency work.

This edited volume presents the results of a European research project – ‘CHILD-UP’ (Children Hybrid Integration: Learning Dialogue as a way of Upgrading Policies of Participation), which analyses the hybrid integration of children with migration backgrounds into schools across Europe. Using qualitative data and theoretical foundations obtained through interviews and focus groups, the book ultimately centres the perspectives and experiences of both the children and the professionals working with them. In doing so, it explores the complex position migrant children occupy in host societies, their exercise of agency, challenges and inspirational local practices that support hybrid integration and innovative educational planning. It also analyses the facilitation of conversations concerning children’s personal experiences and social relations, second language learning and language mediation, based on video- and audio-recordings of school activities. The book will be of relevance to researchers, academics, scholars, and faculty in the fields of sociology of education, child development, migration and multicultural studies. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

The Internet has penetrated material reality to such an extent that it is now often impossible to disentangle the material from the virtual. In this postdigital scenario, the encounter with ›newness‹ becomes accessible at the touch of a button, 24/7. Learning becomes a lifewide experience which allows for the emergence of new culturalities. The contributors to this volume engage with cultural changes brought about by an intensified digitalization process in the context of formal education but also shed light on unexpected contexts in which informal learning experiences take place every day, strengthening diasporas, creating new connections and transforming ourselves and our societies.

This book examines how developing law and policies in England and Wales simultaneously promote and undermine children's rights.

This book introduces the use of facilitation to support children’s agency in the classroom as authors of knowledge. The authors draw on research undertaken in two Year Three classrooms, in which children were invited to share photographs in a workshop to facilitate the sharing and creation of narratives. Motivated by the idea that elevating children’s status to constructors of knowledge is essential for a pedagogy of authentic listening, understandings of childhood are challenged in relation to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and the tension between self-determination and the protection of children. The book will be of interest to academics, students and practitioners in the areas of education, early childhood studies, sociology of childhood, social work, children’s rights and educational management.