Discourses/2. Ireland: Listening to children's voices in Irish social work through cultural and organisational filters

This chapter is concerned with policy and legislation shifts regarding the welfare and education of children in Ireland. Ireland’s social services framework and pedagogical context will be critiqued regarding available space for children’s active involvement in educational decisions and life changes. With help of data collected through interviews with professionals and policy and documentary analysis, it will be assessed and reflected upon if and how self-determination of children is visible and heard within Irish practices in Early Education and Social Work. In particular, it is explored how the individualistic rights based approach to social work and education advanced by state legislation is intertwined with the construction of children as subordinates within the family. Policy driven pedagogy towards children’s active involvement will be explored. We will consider available space accessible to children, who are supported by professionals working closely interpreting policy shifts

Practices/1, Italy: Facilitating participation in early childhood education

This chapter concerns a way of observing activities in early childhood education. In particular, it concerns the observation of children’s active participation in interactions with peers and teachers. This observation regards three different levels of children’s participation: (1) children’s understanding (concerning what has been said and the reasons/intentions for saying); (2) children’s actions and their design; (3) communication processes involving children, as sequences of actions. An important issue in this observation is if children’s participation can also mean children’s agency. Agency means display of autonomy in action, choosing among different possibilities, which allows children’s promotion of change of communication structures, such as hierarchical and role structures. In educational activities, agency is made visible as attribution to children of rights and responsibilities in producing knowledge, i.e. as epistemic authority. The chapter analyses how children’s epistemic authority is construed in interactions, exploring some ways in which adults can enhance agency in early childhood education. In particular, the paper shows that adults’ facilitation of communication with and among children can be a way of stressing children’s epistemic authority, encouraging a dialogic form of communication with and among children. The chapter shows examples of adults’ facilitation through the analysis of transcriptions of videotaped interactions. The analysis shows that facilitation implies specific structures of roles and expectations in early childhood education