Participation and why it matters: children’s perspectives and expressions of ownership, motivation, collective efficacy and self-efficacy and locus of control

Abstract

There is a strong belief among environmental and sustainability educators and researchers that meaningful education can benefit from participatory approaches. Participation in decision-making, community cooperation, and interaction, development of team communication, solidarity and real action resulting in real outcomes, are the qualities that should characterize the participation children experience from a project. However, there is a strong criticism that many projects are characterized by a kind of ‘pseudo-participation’ that limits children’s opportunities for personal growth and learning. In this paper we explore how participation is constituted from the perspective of children, as well as if children’s participation creates opportunities for the expression of ownership, locus of control ans self-efficacy, motivation for action and collective efficacy. Ninety-five, nine to eleven-year-old students from six elementary schools that were involved in schools’ kitchen garden projects were interviewed for the purpose of this study. We concluded that successful projects are characterized by a structured design that forecasts and arranges how children participate in the decision-making process, how they participate in all the necessary tasks required for cultivating a garden, and how the teachers facilitate the process.

Keywords:

• Children’s participation
• ownership
• motivation
• collective efficacy
• locus of control and self-efficacy
• school kitchen-gardens

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank the anonymous reviewers for their precious comments on earlier versions of this paper. We would also like to thank Dr. Daniel Wilson for his thorough proofreading of the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Konstantinos Korfiatis

Konstantinos Korfiatis is Associate Professor of Environmental Education at the Department of Education, University of Cyprus. His research interests extend in the areas of environmental and sustainability education and ecology education. He currently focuses on the development of learning environments that can support meaningful participation, agency and environmental citizenship, especially in connection with school gardening and climate change education.

Stella Petrou

Stella Petrou is Special Teaching Staff at the Department of Education, University of Cyprus. Her research interests are on environmental and sustainability education, with a focus on school gardens as learning environments promoting children’s personal development.