Positioning pedagogy—a matter of children’s rights

Abstract

This paper foregrounds pedagogy in the realisation of children’s rights to non-discrimination and serving their best interests, as articulated in the UNCRC. Drawing on a mixed methodological study of teachers in 12 schools it does so through exploring teacher pedagogies in terms of how they 'think', 'do' and 'talk' pedagogy, conceived as their pedagogic 'habitus'. Findings confirm contradictions between teachers’ ideals and their practice that is significantly mediated by the socio-cultural context of their schools, gender and presence of migrant children. Especially striking is that neither social justice concerns nor children’s rights explicitly emerge in their narratives, in turn influencing how they ‘do’ pedagogy with different groups of children. This contradiction is understood as a dialectical process of re/action influenced by structures, policies and the exercise of power in local contexts. The UNCRC provides a generative mechanism within which to hold government to account for the impact of policies, especially in challenging contexts. To be realised in practice, however, it also needs to be embedded in teacher habitus, shaping their dispositions toward children’s rights to non-discrimination and serving their best interests in education.

Keywords:

• Children's rights
• pedagogy
• habitus
• social justice
• teachers
• migrant children

Acknowledgement

The authors would like to acknowledge the contribution of Dr Declan Fahie, UCD School of Education, to the wider study from which this paper is drawn.

Notes

1. Similarly with respect to assessment. See for example Elwood and Lundy (2010) for an analysis of intensifying assessment within a children’s rights frame.

2. It is important to note that as researchers we were totally exploratory in the issues that emerged and therefore did not insert any direct questions in relation to either children’s rights or issues of equality and non-discrimination.

3. A review of the correlation matrix tested for multicollinearity and singularity, with the majority of values ranging between .3 and .8, and identified as statistically significant, thus ensuring that EFA could be undertaken with the data, in spite of the small overall small sample. Bartlett’s test of Sphericity was significant (chi-square 1643.55, df_351, pB.001) also indicating that EFA was appropriate for this set of variables. The KMO measure of sampling accuracy was .851, indicating that the sample size was appropriate for EFA.

4. It was undoubtedly also influenced by the institutional habitus of each school and the impact of student characteristics, as well as leadership practices in shaping this habitus at school and at class level; but this is beyond the focus of this paper (see Devine, 2013b).