Children’s rights in the field of early education

ABSTRACT

The psychologist’s work in education is a field permanently under construction, crossed by multiple tensions. Some tensions are macrosocial, where the design of educational policy obliges us to study the impacts that policy produces in the microspaces of power and professional practice. Uruguay’s education law, enacted in 2008, clearly adopts a rights perspective, recognizing children as subjects of law. This raises the issue of how, in their daily work, professionals see and perform their role as guarantors of children’s rights. At a microsocial level, educational centres become privileged places to deploy rights promotion practices.

Our research group in Early Childhood and Early Education has carried out qualitative studies with the objective of contributing to the integration of a children’s rights perspective in the field of Early Education.

This article reports on two studies. In one the teachers take progressive autonomy as an axis of analysis while in the other the axis of analysis is the participation of children in educational practices. The data collection techniques used were discussion groups, participant observation and in-depth interviews.

The results show that although many of the teachers’ educational actions reflect a conception of the child as a subject of rights, the teachers do not see these actions in terms of guaranteeing children’s rights.

The dialogue generated by these results has fed back and enriched the analysis of the dimensions studied, as well as our rights-promoting interventions in the Early Education centres.

KEYWORDS:

• Children’s rights
• early education
• educational policy
• participation
• Uruguay

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. This refers to the Continuing Education Course: ‘Progressive autonomy and child participation in the field of early education’ that authors of this article have run every year since 2013 in the School of Psychology. Universidad de la República.