Abstract
The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) is widely regarded as the international tool and legal framework for the advocacy of children’s rights and freedoms, across the globe. Twenty-five years on from its adoption by the UN general assembly, the UNCRC has now accumulated the signatures of 193 countries, including every one of the United Nations member states, with the notable exception of the United States (see Chapter 6 for a discussion of why this is the case). That it has achieved such worldwide recognition is an indisputable acknowledgment of the moral and ethical development of humanity, and testimony to the increasing status that children and young people hold as rights-bearing global citizens within the international community. As a text and symbol, however, the UNCRC is not without its limitations as the ‘go to’ document and definitive guide on all aspects of children’s rights. For example, as a historic and culturally bound document, to what extent can it stand in for such a complex ethical agenda outside of the global North? (see e.g. Chapter 6). In what ways can it be used as leverage to pursue a national or partial agenda, whereby the letter of the law conflates and overrides the underpinning moral ethic? (see e.g. Chapters 1 and 3). And what are the potential tensions and conflicts raised between the different rights and freedoms afforded? (see e.g. Chapter 7). In tackling such questions, Children’s Rights, Educational Research and the UNCRC: past, present and future is both timely and relevant for educational researchers, practitioners, policymakers and students interested in a philosophical engagement with respect to what the concept of children’s rights means and stands for. The book also offers tangible good practice examples of what a children’s rights curriculum might look like, and how it might be enacted in different national school contexts (see particularly Chapters 2, 3 and 4).
While assuming a conversant knowledge and understanding of the CRC, the book challenges readers to look below the surface of the scope and aims of the treaty, in cultivating a critical appreciation of the various policy, practice, legal and symbolic purposes to which the CRC can be put. It urges educationalists (in all their forms) not to shy away from the need to tackle the tensions raised head on; indeed the need to do so is presented as both urgent and imperative.
As an edited collection that draws upon the national contexts of the UK, Australia, Sweden, Finland and Portugal, the various takes on the CRC are divergent, with the open remit to critically consider the UNCRC with respect to theory, policy enactment or educational research from a perspective of past, present and future. Still, the broadness of such an endeavour is also its strength, and the individual chapter contributions stand firm on their own merits and deserve a closer individual examination.
As a specialised point of entry into the role of the UNCRC in educational research over the last 25 years, Chapter 1 reflects a complex and nuanced engagement in key issues, which may be somewhat challenging for the novice researcher or student. I’Anson’s chapter is worth the legwork, however, as his critical insights and conceptual treatment of a rights agenda from a theoretical, policy and epistemological position highlight and problematise some of the key tropes in the discipline, which have become popularised to the point of sounding trite. Critical questions concern the aspiration of the child’s voice, in tasking the reader to consider whose voices speak and how are they given a platform; with respect to the aspiration of children’s participation, he asks whether this concerns children’s involvement in activities or the relations that shape that involvement, and whether the drive to advocate for children’s rights has silenced a more critical engagement with the socio-cultural and linguistic translation processes of the CRC, and lack of transparency around the decisions that inform this. I’Anson also advances a more profitable research agenda that seeks the cultural construction of the good through a counterpoint approach that carefully evaluates the strengths and limits of the construction of children’s rights, while also acknowledging contrasting themes or forces that counter the given moral position. In navigating the choppy terrain of educational research into children’s rights, he arms the reader with the tools to differentiate between the worthy and the worthwhile that (while not explicitly stated) may well be suited to a critical realist position.
In Chapter 2 Louise Phillips engages with Article 42 concerning the obligation to communicate the ‘principles and provisions of the Convention widely … to adults and children alike’ (p.39). This is important because children need to know their rights in order to appreciate their own inherent dignity and value as world citizens, but also in order to make a claim on their rights. Phillips acknowledges that this key objective is still not being met, in being hindered by public discourses around children as unruly, incompetent, innocent and developing, as opposed to competent social actors and citizens of the present, not merely the future. Phillips points towards the scarcity of human rights education within teacher education and professional development as further obstacles to the inculcation in children of an understanding of their rights as laid out in the CRC. In spite of the limitations within national policy agendas in embracing Article 42, Phillips notes that the drive to meet this obligation has largely emanated from NGOs and the UN including, firstly, the UNICEF Child Friendly Schools (aimed at developing or post-conflict nations). In highlighting best practice examples to emerge from this programme Phillips points to the child governments established within Child Friendly schools in Mali, which are now nationally approved by the Mali Ministry of Education. Notwithstanding its limitations, Phillips also recognises the UNICEF Rights Respecting Schools programme implemented in the UK and Canada. The success of such initiatives in instilling within children an appreciation for their rights can be seen to lead to positive attitudes towards schooling and diversity, a greater sense of agency and the ability to resolve conflict (Sebba and Robinson, 2014, p.18). However, barriers to Article 42 include the tendency for schools to afford children decision-making powers only on issues that are peripheral as opposed to central to the school, as well as sidelining the voices of children whose values run counter to the adults in school. With respect to future resourcing, Phillips advocates for the harnessing of information technology and new media platforms to embed CRC communication strategies in order to engage and captivate children in motivating their identities as rights bearers.
Chapter 3 concerns issues emerging in the teaching of children’s rights, in acknowledging that this is an ideological endeavour, and as such subject to historical, political, economic and social contexts. Nina Thelander explores this in the case of Sweden, for which the policy translation of human rights education prescribes a certain type of education that can be both applauded and criticised. Its strengths are in providing an alternative to the market-based model and in positioning the global human being above the national citizen. However, it can also be criticised for advocating a model of education systems that reflects western values, as well as the General Assembly world programme plan of Action 2005-2009 aspiration that human rights education can improve the effectiveness of national systems. Thelander argues that human rights and children’s rights are seen as different things within schooling, where the latter is pursued as discrete from the former. She advocates for the integration of human rights perspectives within both the national and the global context.
Niemi, Kumpulainen and Lipponen also consider the pedagogy of children’s rights, with a specific CRC focus upon children’s participation and agency. In drawing on a six-year action research study carried out by the first author, Chapter 4 provides a refreshing insight into good practice examples of how children’s participation can be meaningfully achieved in the context of the Finnish primary school. In doing so, the authors note that the concept of children’s participation is not unproblematic, in that to achieve sound purchase it should be child-initiated and involve children as active decision makers. Successful strategies highlighted for achieving this included photo elicitation, by which students can capture, in real time, positive and negative examples of classroom practice, as a prompt into identifying solutions. The role of story telling is also raised as a creative way for students to participate in the evaluation of learning outcomes. Such findings are an indication of the success of the Finnish core curriculum for early years education, in respecting children’s rights of participation. It is notable that the success of such interventions may in part be explained by Finland’s divergence from the neoliberal emphasis on standardised performance indicators, with the result that teachers can also pay attention to educational questions that do not relate directly to learning outcomes, but that are important questions in their everyday lives.
In Chapter 5, Joana Lúcio and Fernando Ilídio Ferreira report on the impact of austerity cuts post 2011 upon the welfare of children and families in Portugal, which has disproportionally affected almost a third of children who are now in poverty. They show how in such an economic climate, children’s rights to citizenship and civic engagement can become impaired. A once well-established welfare system has been significantly affected by Portugal’s economic deficit, and this chapter explores the impact on teacher training and the diminished role for children’s rights training, and indeed a broader ethical social and cultural awareness. Drawing upon their study into teachers’ narratives of their training, the authors reveal vastly diverging accounts of the role and meaning of children’s rights. At the same time, there has been a general consensus that although theoretical training was sufficient, there was little evidence of practical application of these concepts in a systematic way. While more recent shifts may have started to tackle some of the key welfare shortfalls, it is yet to be seen how this translates into teacher education.
As one of the highlights of the book, Chapter 6 takes to task Article 16 of the UNCRC concerning children’s ‘right’ to privacy, in exploring the concept on a range of levels including the philosophical, political, legal, and material. In contrast to many of the other chapters, it also provides an overview to the UNCRC as a complete text and aspiration, which is helpful to the novice educational researcher, for example in conceptualising a difference between those who uphold a protective function vis-à-vis those who confer the right to self-determination. Here Gordon Tait and Mallihai Tambyah develop a philosophical debate into whether we can separate ‘natural’ or essential human/child rights from the historical or cultural context. They argue not, in pointing towards a fundamental tension between the liberal aspiration of personal freedom, and the neoliberal imperative of regulation and control of social behaviour. This is discussed both with respect to social control by those in government, and in terms of commercial exploitation. With specific reference to the education system, Tait and Tambyah borrow from Rose’s (1990) insights into how surveillance technologies intrude into the home and school, whereby parents and educators feel compelled to override children’s right to privacy which is trumped by their legal and moral imperatives (real, or imagined) towards provision and protection. While illuminating the role of privacy as an impossible ideal, Tait and Tambyah justify its inclusion within the UNCRC for its key function as an aspiration and ‘symbolic benchmark for framing the debates around childhood’ (p.138).
In the final chapter, editors Jenna Gillett-Swan and Vicki Coppock reflect on the methodological implications for rights-based educational research within the current digital age. This chapter highlights how at the time when the UNCRC was developed the internet was in its infancy, and the considerations for the varying emphases of a children’s rights agenda have become far more complex in light of technological advances. The chapter provides a useful framework for considering the aims of the UNCRC, in dividing it into three umbrella headings: ‘provision’ with respect to ‘access to and utilization of key education, health and social services’ (p.145); ‘participation’, which relates to the empowerment of children and young people as ‘informed and active advocates of their rights’ (ibid); and ‘protection’ from the ‘potential for violation of children’s rights’ (ibid). Not only have each of these aims become more difficult to satisfy following the digital revolution, but the tensions and conflicts between them have also become more pronounced, and incite more complex ethical considerations. For example, children have ardently voiced their right to participate within digital platforms, but the protection of children from the outcomes of this engagement can be very difficult for educational researchers, particularly as many of us are digital immigrants compared to the digital ‘natives’ of up and coming generations (Prensky, 2001). This is all the more pressing, given the arguments raised in Chapter 6 that there are highly lucrative industries profiting from information on users’ participation online, which poses a new concern with respect to children’s ‘right to be forgotten’ (European Commission, 2015) and not held accountable for their digital footprint. Nevertheless, as the chapter concludes, the rights pertaining to digital technology are not fundamentally different from those that concern educational researchers in the ‘real’ world, and the associated complexity should not deter us from engaging in such debates.
In justifying their inclusion within the book, the authors acknowledge that the chapter entries emerged from round table discussions in the European Conference on Educational Research (ECER) Network 25, which concerned a ‘critical exploration of the ways in which the UNRCR has informed, presently informs and may in future inform educational research internationally’ (p.10). In guiding this selection, Coppock and Gillett-Swan highlight three themes in educational research into children’s rights that they introduce as a loose framework (Reynaert et al, 2009). These concern ‘autonomy and participation’ (p.520); the tension between ‘children’s rights versus parental rights’; and the dominance of the ‘global children’s rights industry’ (p.526). While the authors acknowledge that these themes ‘are (to a greater or lesser extent) evident’ across the book (p.10), they could perhaps have been given greater emphasis as a scaffold to drive home the text’s core messages. This might have strengthened the overall contribution of the book as discrete from the sum of its parts. Future editions might also consider the inclusion of an introductory chapter in the form of a user’s guide to the UNCRC, as an overview of the treaty, so as to orientate the novice educational researcher towards the critical insights that follow. This would also offer a useful point to cross-reference the varying emphases taken by the contributing authors. Notwithstanding these limitations, the value of this book is in its critical appreciation of the historical strengths and limitations of the UNCRC and in pointing towards new lines of enquiry that may shape future efforts to update the framework for current and future global contexts. In its aims and scope, the book is also laudable for firmly locating the issue of children’s rights as central within educational research; not as an ‘add on’ or afterthought, but as a fundamental driving force at every phase of the research process, including its translation into policy and practice.