My doctoral research has explored how young children’s participation was put into
practice—how it was ‘lived’ and negotiated—in the context of one early learning
and childcare setting.
The concept of children’s participation is rooted in large part in the UN Convention
on the Rights of the Child (1989), which enshrines children’s right to express their
views and have those views taken into account. However, young children’s
participation rights are often overlooked. The more prominent discourse about young
children has been one that focuses on early childhood as a preparatory period of life,
in which adults must intervene and shape children’s development. My research has
therefore focused on child-adult relationships within the early childhood setting,
looking at how young children and early childhood practitioners ‘lived’ children’s
participation and negotiated the tensions and challenges that arose for them.
To carry out the research, I used an ethnographic methodology to study one
fieldwork site in depth. ‘Castle Nursery’ was an early learning and childcare setting
in Scotland, where practitioners professed to work in participatory ways with young
children. The long-term nature of ethnography allowed me to observe how children’s
participation was lived and negotiated at Castle Nursery over an eight-month period
of fieldwork.
The research found that practitioners challenged adult-led, ‘schoolified’ practices by
foregrounding young children’s knowledge and contributions to the setting.
Children’s participation was embedded into play-based pedagogy at Castle Nursery,
with practitioners organising time and space to allow young children a great deal of
influence over their daily experiences. Rather than planning adult-led learning
activities, practitioners instead cultivated a rich learning environment for children to
explore, through free-flow play.
The thesis has also highlighted a variety of tensions and challenges that arose. Even
at Castle Nursery, where practitioners were proud of the ways their work challenged
conventional norms about young children, there were limits to how far practitioners
would take a participatory approach. The thesis has particularly highlighted the
importance of reflective practices about the ethical dimensions of early childhood
practice. Uncertainty seemed to be an inevitable and enduring feature of living
young children’s participation