Børn i udsatte positioner i implementeringen af Den styrkede pædagogiske læreplan: Et pædagogisk dilemma flytter med

The strengthened pedagogical curriculum is by various parties presented as a movement away from a narrow focus on educational output with measurements of children’s progress and capabilities. Because of this, accompanying legal frameworks contains a distancing to criticized time-consuming documentation requirements set for day care professionals’ work. However, before as well as after the legislative change, municipal administrations of day care have an obligation to secure measures towards children in vulnerable positions. In this study, we examine the implementation of the strengthened pedagogical curriculum in four municipalities, with a focus on municipal decisions in regards to children in vulnerable positions. The main conclusion is that all municipalities choose to maintain tools to measure and describe all children’s learning and progress, and that this is done with reference to children in vulnerable positions. The study discusses a basic pedagogical dilemma between, on the one hand, making individual children’s challenges visible – and thus risking that children will be met by focus at their deficiency. And, on the other hand, refraining from pointing out challenges – and, because of that, risking that special needs will not be met and competencies needed in school and life will not be sufficiently developed

Child Sexual Abuse and Exploitation through Livestreaming in Indonesia: Unequal Power Relations at the Root of Child Victimization

Child sexual abuse and exploitation through livestreaming is a rising phenomenon of online child sexual abuse and exploitation in Indonesia. This phenomenon takes place in both offline and online spaces. Moreover, due to the active involvement of the viewers, these content viewers can also be considered as offenders. Thus, it is necessary to recognize this phenomenon as a crime against children, instead of merely a sexual act. By using a criminology perspective, this research explores the roots of this phenomenon, the impact on survivors, and the child protection system’s actions against it. This qualitative study used secondary data analysis, derived from a total of nineteen Indonesian news articles as well as five cases of child sexual exploitation and abuse through livestreaming. Power relations theory by Michel Foucault is used to explain the power relations and victimization in this phenomenon. The analysis shows that unequal power relations between adults and children contribute to the phenomenon. The unequal power relations include how societies perceive children, victim-blaming, gender inequality, and the existing situation of the porn industry, which places the children in vulnerable positions. The child survivors in these case studies were found to experience multiple victimizations, including sexual abuse in real life and online in conjunction with economic victimization. These victimization processes are prolonged due to the fact that sexual content is rapidly shared by the offenders; thus, the situation can be described as chronic revictimization. Indonesian systems for protecting children against such crimes were found to be inefficient due to the absence of legal terminology to define child sexual abuse and exploitation through livestreaming and the lack of laws that can be used to punish the viewers

Drawing a river:Utilizing the Power of Metaphors in Interviews With Children and Young People

In the field of qualitative health research on children, scholars have called for the inclusion of children’s perspectives. Still, health care research on children appears to be characterized by an exclusionary approach that stems from a conception of disability and sickness as equivalent to a lack of agency. This article responds to the call to include children’s perspectives. It presents the Double-view (Dovi)-river interview, which is a drawing- and metaphor-based interview method that enables ambiguous and multi-layered life course narratives. Based on two steps – (1) a life course interview conducted while drawing a river of the child’s life and (2) revisiting and unfolding the child’s stories – the method allows for an arts-based, joint exploration of life experiences. Inspired by childhood studies as well as a poststructuralist epistemology, the article discusses and proposes ways to challenge power relations between the adult interviewer and the child interviewee. It is argued that the method can also challenge the predominant deficit view and the dichotomous understanding of children’s experiences of their life and capabilities that characterize much health care practice and health research, by focusing both on challenges and opportunities. Doing so enables a more nuanced and appreciative approach to children. We draw on empirical examples from a study with children with disabilities. However, we suggest that the method’s potential for enabling articulation of the complex and ambiguous can inspire qualitative research and health care practice more broadly

From combatant to casualty :challenging conceptions of children's political agency in Colombia

PhD ThesisThis project aims to advance understandings of children as political agents. Children are emerging as complex political actors in global conflicts. Their ambiguous roles on the battlefield pose important questions about their positioning in post-conflict society, particularly through mechanisms of transitional justice. Despite this, there is a lack of scholarly engagement with the question of the political agency of children in post-conflict societies. Of particular concern is how social constructs of “children” and “childhood” prevent those who are under 18 from receiving the support they need to be viewed as legitimate political actors. Child actors are thus not acknowledged in their own terms. Rather their roles as actors are framed through the conceptualisation and context of an adult world that is not designed to, nor has made space for, understanding their political agency. Due to a lack of self-determination and self-definition, a disabling combination, children have been left vulnerable to exploitation and ultimately a denial of political agency. Instead, children exist within a narrow framework defined by cultural and social expectations that prohibit them from partaking in activities considered ʻadult.ʼ When war causes the child to act outside of familiar social frameworks, they become misunderstood, misrepresented, and ultimately marginalised. This thesis examines the overarching international approach towards the child actor through the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC). It investigates the way the UNCRC creates a prescriptive understanding of children and childhood, drawn from a European history of ideas. The thesis identifies three pairs of themes that position the child’s identity: citizenship and agency, innocence and immaturity, education and labour. The case of Colombia is then used to assess the impact of framing the child in this way. By examining the role of children in an environment of conflict and transition to post-conflict, the thesis investigates the international discourse on the child. The context of conflict and postconflict enables an analysis of the roles that children assume that appear contrary to the identity outlined within the UNCRC. This tension between the international discourse on the child and the framework of Colombian discourse affects the security of children in vulnerable positions. The thesis concludes by contesting dominating discourses on children within the international arena and explores the positive implications of positioning the child with greater political agency

"För barnets bästa" : Skolkuratorers samarbete med övrig skolpersonal gällande anmälningsskyldigheten i Socialtjänstlagen vid misstanke om att barn far illa

The purpose of this essay was to study how school welfare officers cooperate with other school staff, regarding children in vulnerable positions, and how the school staff apply their obligation to report to the social services if they have concerns regarding children at risk, according to the law of social service, SoL. We have especially focused on questions concerning cooperation, both between the school staff, and between the school and the social services. We also wanted to identify some of the restraining factors and dilemmas that could come up during the process of reporting children at risk to the social services. The study was based on qualitative interviews with ten school welfare officers from the same municipality. Our conclusions of our study are that there exists a well-developed cooperation between several organizational levels, including the school welfare officers, other professions in the schools and the social services. There were though opinions among the school welfare officers that they wanted to increase their professional claims in relation to the school nurse, due to their larger competence in talking to children. Regarding the formal responsibility to report to the social services, a majority of the school welfare officers felt they had access to the support they needed from both their principal and the students healthcare-team, and that they were not left alone in the process

Playful and physical active storytelling in day care settings

This paper is about playful and physically active storytelling (PPAST) with children in day care. It is highlighting why this way of telling a story, combined with pedagogical tact for maintaining play mood during the story, can support 2–5-year-old children´s imaginary play. From 2016 to 2020 three prototypes of physical active stories for kindergartens and seven for nurseries and home-nurseries were designed to facilitate PPAST in day care. The stories were designed in a design-based research approach drawing on qualitative as well as quantitative data generation. The material was distributed to 3.000 day care facilities in Denmark. This paper aims at answering two questions: How does PPAST work for different groups of children? What makes PPAST playful? According to the participating pedagogues the children that benefit the most from PPAST are children in vulnerable positions. Seven principles of significance for play to emerge during or after PPAST can be deduced from the empirical data. PPAST must include children’s co-determination, children´s as well as the pedagogue’s embodiment of the story rituals, an imaginative open storyline that can be combined with aesthetic improvisations and the inclusion of affordances in the physical environment and finally, storytelling object(s) that inspire the story and remain when the storytelling ends are essential. And perhaps most importantly, the story must give room for children’s differentiated participation

Affectivity and Relational Awareness in Pedagogy and Education: moments of hesitation in intersubjective encounters

In this article, we put forward the concept ‘relational awareness’ to describe a conscious awareness of the experience of relational responsivity and dynamics of change in stressful intersubjective encounters in pedagogy and education. This concept is inspired by phenomenology and cultural-historical theory. We introduce the theories of extended affectivity, embodied resonance and intersubjectivity and relate these to cultural-historical psychology in order to explore how people appraise and understand situations related to societal goals, motives, practices and mediating means. Relational awareness, which involves being consciously aware of embodied, pre-reflective relational responsivity, is specific to the cultural context, to the mediating means, and the lived experiences of the person. Relational awareness and responsivity can be objects of reflection and education when educational practices include deliberate work on embodied experience and mediational means to reflect on and change experienced intercorporeity. Relational awareness differs from interpersonal perception in that it involves embodied activity mediated by embodied knowledge and social means of language and discourse.Our conceptualisation of relational awareness is empirically driven by two qualitative studies of preschool teachers’ and teachers’ embodied practices to become presently aware during intersubjective encounters with children in stressful everyday conditions. The embodied practices in the study were inspired by exercises in mindfulness and compassion, which were adjusted according to how the participants experienced their significance. The flexibly adjusted exercises and discourses appeared to provide participants with the mediational embodied and discoursive means to become relationally aware in difficult encounters. Biesta’s conceptualisation of ‘moments of hesitation’ contributes to the discussion of ‘relational awareness’ in education and care