The limits of participation

“Participation” implies both an invitation and an ability to participate in or comment on a question or process. Not all children receive these invitations equally - they may be hidden, or we may avoid involving children we consider "demanding" in certain activities. Even when we do involve everybody equally, the questions, opportunities and processes we invite children to participate in are often those which adults have devised – with a shape, set of rules or purpose that has already been decided.

For example, we may invite children’s responses to a question we have selected, in order to measure a curriculum outcome. We might ask “What do we know about winter?”, regardless of whether children have had the opportunity to freely encounter the seasons in their play and discover their own interest in them.

Breakfast foods laid out on a tablecloth Alternatively, we may present children with a narrow set of implicit options in their day-to-day environments (Inside or outside, home corner or story corner, apple or raisins, happy or sad etc) and hold up these limited/binary choices as “participation”. Or we may have a preconceived plan which we want children to endorse. (“Should we go to the museum today?”)

Moosa-Mitha and the UNCRC encourage us, as adults, to “acknowledge” and “take seriously” children’s views. However, they do not fundamentally challenge the idea that adults are routinely gatekeepers of what is right, appropriate or “available” or that we control the ways in which children are invited to participate.

Three pitfalls

Kay Tisdall (2015) reminds us that participation can easily be:
• Tokenistic (have no real interest in acting on children’s contributions)
• Instrumental (highly selective of children’s contributions in order to reinforce our own aims)
• Exclusionary (amplify the children who speak most, or forget that an invitation to participate isn’t enough if children have previously been disempowered).

Case study

Anita is struggling to support children’s free play when she also has to get everything ready on the lunch tables. One day a child asks Anita to read her a story just before lunch time. At the next team meeting Anita says that “the children” have been asking to have a story before lunch time – and suggests that all the children are invited to sit down for story time at 11.30. Some colleagues sense that other children may have different needs on different days, but it is agreed to implement Anita’s idea because it has come from “the children” and staff can see how it will help Anita.

Q: Which of Tisdall’s concerns are reflected in this situation?
Q: What alternative approaches could have been used to consider children’s perspectives and balance them with Anita’s needs?

Questions for individual or team reflection

1. What methods for listening to children do you currently use in your setting or individual practice, for example about:
- their own learning
- world-views
- use of the environment
- personal care
- food lives
- clothing choices
- routines
- transitions and separation?

1b. Do these methods ever fall into any of the pitfalls outlined above? Can you easily change them – or do you need to change wider systems also?

2. How responsive are you able to be to what children bring, even if it challenges your own/team/parents' ideas, routines, plans and priorities?

3. Do you invite participation in ways that are always accessible or meaningful to each child’s unique personality, abilities or ways of being?

Children’s Participation, A Toolkit – Table of Contents

1. What is participation 2. Limits of participation 3. Children’s resistances 4. Children’s right to shape the world 5. New worlds 6. A co-learning community 7. A new kind of citizenship 8. Resources