Towards children’s democratic participation: Co-constructing Place-Based Pedagogies for early Years Environmentalism

• In Event: The Power of Pedagogy for Sustainability Transformation

Proposal

In 2021, both Runciman (2021) and Wall (2021) argued in the UK that children should be able to vote from the age of 6. A wild thought? Mainstream counterarguments generally fear the impact this section of the population would have on electoral outcomes, mostly due to age-related lack of competence. However, demographic shapes of society in most WEIRD contexts at least are skewed towards the over 40s, meaning that impact of younger voters would not be significant. Moreover, they continued, if there are no competence test applied to other sections of the population, why should we assume that children are not fit to vote?
Conversely, extending the right to vote to children could expand the accountability of leaders, as democracy would need to become more inclusive in the short term, due to the wider electorate. In the long term, this would yield better informed citizens, as they have been included from earlier. Last, including younger sections of the population would ensure future oriented issues are given due consideration – such as education, for example, and climate change. These are the broad aims this study works towards.
In April 2022, the UK Department for Education (2022) produced a policy paper titled ‘Sustainability and climate change: a strategy for the education and children’s services systems’, which set the objectives the country wanted to achieve by 2030. These revolve around the need for educational setting to achieve ‘net zero’ in working towards better environments, while also increasing young people’s resilience to climate change, in a context of continued excellence in education. Although some of these can be achieved via architectural/engineered solutions around retrofitting and green energy consumptions, others are heavily dependent on the human factor (Devine-Wright et al, 2022). This positions educational communities as key actors in the fight to mitigate and adapt to climate change: children should not – cannot – be passively included.
By means of identifying ways for children to actively participate, this paper reports back from a period of 2 months of participant observation in 3 primary schools in the South of England. 2 of the schools are in an urban setting, and did not offer any environmental education to the pupils, despite expressing the desire to enhance their provision in this sense. In these schools, the PI ran an after-school club with approximately 5 University students aiming to one day work with children and young people, and up to 20 children aged 5-7. The sessions offered children the opportunity to engage with a number of activities broadly aimed at supporting the development of an emotional bond with their immediate environments. In line with Malone (2013), the theory of change maintains that a positive interactive cycle of accessibility, mobility and engagement with environment leads to environmental change agency. The third school in set in a semi-urban area, benefits from an extended outdoor space, and has embraced a stronger environmental ethos, whereby environmentalism is embedded in the curriculum, and therefore open and accessible to all pupils.
In reflecting upon these experiences, this contribution asks: What pedagogies might our education institutions and sets of classrooms embrace that enable the development of capacities to act – for those who are generally constructed as passive? The pedagogical approach I discuss here revolves around a practice of ‘doing’ that takes after John Dewey’s educational philosophy (1958). Pedagogies that are co-constructed with children necessarily present as disruptions in educational scenarios that are mostly structured by adults. Moreover, they offer insight into how to operationalise Kirby and Webb’s (2023) encouragement to embrace uncertainty as a necessary prerequisite for participation and inclusion. Necessarily, the experiences discussed here do not present as ‘lesson plans’. Yet, engaging with these ‘disruptions’ of more mainstream takes on the National Curriculum can be harnessed, for example by feeding into the development of teachers’ training resources that invite and enable children’s voices. My claim here is that mainstreaming uncertainty ultimately enables a specific type of agency, one that exists within the relations that develop around the production of knowledge. Uncertainty disrupts the age-related hierarchies traditional education setting rely on – yet by so doing may be more meaningfully conducive to children’s democratic participation.

Author

• Francesca Salvi, University of Nottingham