what counts as student voice in active citizenship case studies? education for citizenship in...

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DOI: 10.1177/1746197907081261 2007; 2; 237 Education, Citizenship and Social Justice

Hamish Ross, Pamela Munn and Jane Brown citizenship in Scotland

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237

Ross et al.: student voice in active citizenship case studies

what counts as student voice in active citizenship case studies?education for citizenship in Scotland

Hamish Ross, Pamela Munn and Jane BrownUniversity of Edinburgh, UK

A B S T R A C T

We analyse a teacher-to-teacher discourse (14 web-published case studies) concerning ‘participation as citizenship’ in schools. Many different mechanisms through which pupils participate are reported (from school councils to paired-reading schemes and community links). The claimed outcomes of these activities are also varied: improving the effectiveness of schools, developing skills, and promoting feelings of involvement and empowerment among the participating pupils. Significantly, the outcomes are not radically or politically transformative and are generally contained within schools’ existing structures. The texts reveal their adult authors’ range of understandings of children and schooling, which help to explain the relatively conservative pattern of outcomes. However, the pattern is also explained, in part, by the contested interpretations of both participation and citizenship, and by the open and permissive model of education for citizenship favoured in Scotland.

K E Y W O R D S citizenship, participation, Scotland, student voice, teacher discourse

introduction

This article reports an investigation of understandings of ‘pupil voice’ or pupil participation in a ‘teacher-to-teacher’ discourse. Ideas of pupil participation in education are current and, in part, entangled with the rise of citizenship education. Both ‘participation’ and ‘citizenship’ can be read in a variety of ways. This study is interested in how they are read by teachers. Since there are differences in how citizenship education is conceived in different parts of the

education, citizenship and social justice

Copyright © 2007, SAGE Publications (www.sagepublications.com)Vol 2(3) 237–256 [ISSN 1746-1979 DOI 10.1177/1746197907081261]

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education, citizenship and social justice 2(3)

UK and beyond, our focus is specifically on teachers, including headteachers, in the Scottish education system. However, our findings are likely to be of wider interest.

The texts used are from two series of case studies written by teachers con-cerning pupil participation initiatives, particularly in relation to citizenship education. The texts were published online to the Scottish education profession in general. Given the exploratory nature of this research and the ontological status of the discourse, making generalised empirical claims was not an object-ive of this study. However, the text offered an insight into a number of theoretical issues concerning pupil participation and ‘participation as citizenship’.

In particular, we found that pupil participation was deployed in support of the schools’ pre-existing objectives rather than being understood as having alternative, emancipatory, or any inherent, goals. The participation projects are not understood as being radical in any sense relating to power or hierarchy in schools. This conclusion is revealed not only in the direct discourse of the case studies, but also in indirect ways. The most notable of the latter is the col-lection of the child actors into a single, non-problematic category of ‘pupil’ or ‘child’, generally homogenous except in terms of age. It is presumably difficult for teachers (and society) to construct their charges as ‘oppressed’, since child-hood, whatever it might mean, confers a transient and temporary status (unlike, say, gender or race). However, the discourse also allows us access to teacher understandings of the argument that schooling might be where we learn to resist so that, should we find ourselves categorised more intransigently, we can do something about it.

While we discuss these kinds of issues in relation to a relatively limited data set, it is worth noting that we might understand these particular texts as being produced by teaching professionals and institutions that might variously be seen as ‘early adopters’, or ‘agenda sensitive’. The conservatism of the discourse in relation to active participation might, therefore, be all the more significant.

citizenship education

In the recent past there has been a world-wide resurgence of interest in education for citizenship from politicians and educators (Biesta and Lawy, 2006; Osler and Starkey, 2005). This is variously ascribed to: concerns over political disengagement, particularly, in the UK, in the face of increasingly devolved decision-making; growing interest in values education (in response to concern with indiscipline/behaviour and/or in resistance to instrumentalist approaches to education and to moral relativism); a growing need to educate for an increasingly globalized life; and the development of the children’s rights agenda. It is likely that the character of citizenship education (and of pupil participation as part of it), including in teacher discourse, will to some extent



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reflect its perceived purposes. The current interest in education for citizen-ship can be read in different ways and as serving different purposes reflecting the fact that citizenship itself is a contested concept. In broad contrast, the purposes of education for citizenship can be seen as either liberation (Biesta and Lawy, 2006) or a vehicle for surveillance and social control (James and James, 2001).

pupil participation/voice

It is important to draw attention to the different purposes of education for citizenship while, at the same time, emphasising that a common element in current citizenship developments is that of young people’s active participa-tion in school decision-making. Osler and Starkey (2005: 25) in their review point out that the role of formal mechanisms or structures for student par-ticipation is a ‘strongly represented theme in the literature.’ However, the potentially diverse purposes of these mechanisms and, indeed, perceptions of the purposes of the wide variety of understandings of pupil participation now in place in schools, seems to us to be under researched and under theorised.

Hart’s (1997) ‘ladder of participation’ is a useful starting point in focusing on activity that might not be participation and that would more appropriately be described with words such as manipulation, deception, decoration and token-ism. Beyond these, however, he differentiates participation in terms of whether children or adults initiate and/or direct decision-making activity. Activity that is both child-initiated and child-directed is very rarely observed, according to Hart, because almost any adult knowledge of the activity, even of (non-secret) play, opens it up to what Fielding (2004) calls the ‘impulse to control’. Hart recognises the possibility of children initiating activity and then including adults at the children’s discretion – essentially recognising and exploiting adult power. However, he was not necessarily discussing schooling. In schools adult initiation seems much more likely, at least in the pre-participation moment, since the institution of schooling is predicated on adult power and decision-making. Unlike a community setting where the boundary between adult and child is more continuous and ambiguous, the school severely institutionalizes the boundary. This applies not only in terms of authority structures (the chil-dren are pupils), but by the different longevities of the actors (individual children are in principle more transient to the institution than the staff).

On the other hand, participation, regardless of who initiates it, might develop a dialogical space, a transforming conscientização (Freire, 1970), encouraging pupils’ voices in school decision-making, disturbing what is ‘taken for granted’ about the way society and schools operate, both in terms of structure and in assumptions made about the role and status of young people.



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constructions of children and the role of schooling

Contests over pupil participation and active citizenship are generally bound up in how children are constructed by society, and are sited in many places including, for our purposes, schools as institutions. Given competing under-standings of children evident in popular, scientific and academic discourses (Jenks, 1996; Morrow, 2006), it is perhaps inevitable that there are competing and contradictory visions of children and young people in the discourse of participation and citizenship. Recent, sociological theories of childhood main-tain that children should be viewed as competent social actors in their own right, rather than passive recipients of socialising forces (James and Prout, 1990). In a similar vein, the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child advocates a model of active citizenry for children. This is at odds with dominant ideologies of Western childhood which are prone to stress the incompetence and vulnerability of children (Stasiulis, 2002), as well as a sequential model of children’s development (Burman, 1994). We might expect these differences to be especially exposed in teacher discourse on pupil participation for citizenship.

education for citizenship in Scotland

Some major developments in Education for Citizenship in Scotland have been recently initiated. These are seen as central to the evolving curriculum for 3–18-year-olds, closely integrated with other priorities, and are expected to be implemented in a devolved, open and experimental way by schools. Most significantly for our purposes, ‘active’ citizenship is seen as central.

education for citizenship in Scotland: a paper for discussion and development

Learning and Teaching Scotland (2002) sets out the key purposes of education for citizenship and the ways in which these might be pursued in schools.1 The report has subsequently featured heavily in the major curriculum review and development known as ‘A Curriculum for Excellence’. The report had a number of important features, some of which are summarised as follows:

• Education for citizenship was seen as a key overarching purpose of the curriculum. It was not seen as a separate subject requiring a specific space in the school timetable.

• The purpose of education for citizenship was to develop young people’s capability for thoughtful and responsible participation in political, economic, social and cultural life.

• Children and young people were seen as citizens now rather than citizens in waiting.



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• It emphasized that young people learn most about citizenship by being active citizens and urged schools to model the kind of society in which active citizenship is encouraged. In particular it encouraged school to promote young people’s active participation in decision making and to develop a participatory ethos.

• It set out an agenda for development, recognizing that schools were already doing good work in many areas.

• It drew attention to values conflicts, power relationships, and the importance of developing critical autonomy in young people.

• It recognized that the article was not the last word on the subject and that there was a need to share experience and ideas as schools discussed and experimented with the suggestions in the paper (Learning and Teaching Scotland, 2002).

Accountability and reporting mechanisms, of course, are very influential on what schools do. Scotland has established five national priorities for school education, each with performance indicators. The focus on development and experimentation was echoed in the performance indicators for education for citizenship, which were developed as part of national priority 4: ‘values and citizenship’. Schools and local authorities were asked to report on their progress in achieving this priority for the first time in 2005. The performance measure is narrative, in that schools are invited to report on the range and scale of activities offered to pupils, which encourage and support the development of education for citizenship.

Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Education (HMIe), which inspects Scotland’s schools, has likewise adopted a permissive approach to evaluating the effective-ness of education for citizenship in Scotland (HMIe, 2003). Thus the background against which schools were encouraged by their local authorities, or national organisations to provide case studies of education for citizenship was enabling and permissive. There was no numeric performance indicator against which schools were to be judged, such as the number of pupil councils in operation or the number of young people engaged in voluntary activities. Rather there was a fairly clear message that schools should develop provision in a way that seemed appropriate to them, albeit against a general framework of the aims and purposes of education for citizenship. Furthermore there were no ‘league tables’ of school effectiveness in education for citizenship.

research methods

In order to interrogate teacher understandings of pupil participation-as-citizenship against this background, we need access to teacher discourse on the subject. In total we analysed 14 case study texts. First, we used eight case study



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texts that were written for The Scottish Schools Ethos Network (SSEN). There-fore, some understanding of the SSEN and the production of the case study text is needed. However, we can say at the outset that we are reporting a pilot study that is designed to test the value of a particular kind of data and open up the theoretical landscape in which it has traction. Our methods are designed to illuminate assumptions ‘about’ pupil participation and to contribute to debate.

The Scottish Schools Ethos Network (SSEN) was established in 1994 respond-ing to requests from schools for help in evaluating and developing their ethos. SSEN had over 1000 member schools, about one-quarter of all schools in Scotland. The network promoted communication among members in many ways, including conferences, newsletters and a website. Case studies, written by teachers for teachers, were a popular and readily accessible means of com-municating the reality of particular developments in action, warts and all. The case studies were distributed to all SSEN members and to all national education organizations in paper form. They were often distributed outside Scotland and they appeared on the network’s website. Thus those writing them, usually headteachers, would be aware of the potential distribution and potential im-pact. The case studies were produced under editorial guidance which set out word length, the avoidance of individuals by name, the need to support any claims about effectiveness by evidence, the desirability of direct quotation and the use of photographs to enliven the text. Beyond this the participatory ethos series asked for contributions respectively about pupil participation in deci-sion making in the classroom, in the school and in the community. They thus seemed an appropriate choice for us to pilot an analysis of representations of pupil voice. Moreover the use of case studies to support developments in schools is common place and is continuing to play a major role in developments in education for citizenship in Scotland (Learning and Teaching Scotland, 2006).

So the discourse in the text lies between school staff and a wider educational audience. We thought it might therefore contain some indication of the ‘voice of the profession’. But despite the large number of schools in the network, only 43 case studies are published and these are voluntarily submitted. So the text we are studying is that of a small, self-selecting population. They may, inter-estingly, represent the more educationally ‘avant garde’, or be ‘early adopters’ or be more connected to wider educational agendas. Moreover, despite some pupil quotations and even pupil co-authoring in the construction of some case studies, they essentially represent the voice of the adult institution, knowingly offered to the public. In a sense, the discourse is ‘motivated’ in ways that may not be recorded in the text itself. And Fielding (2004) has noted that in speaking ‘about’ people we are in a critical way also speaking ‘for’ them. This means that these kinds of study need ultimately to be triangulated against the authentic voice of the pupil/student’s experience of participation in order to make claims about the reality and meaning of these experiences.



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Within this population we have sub-sampled eight case studies (five primary schools, two secondary schools and one special school). These were selected from the published total of 43, based on titles that referred to ‘participation’ and spanned a range of publication dates. Taking the background literature dis-cussed above as our starting point, the three authors open-coded different case studies independently and met to discuss them; then each coded the same two case studies and met to discuss them. An initial coding frame was developed and the present paper reports on the results of its use, where two authors coded three case studies each, and one author coded two case studies, thus covering all eight using the draft coding frame. The advantages of collaborative and team approaches to coding frame development are well documented (Wasser and Bressler, 1996).

Our early interest in the possibility of accessing a kind of shared set of edu-cational dialogic standards resulted in some of our early categories focusing on ‘who was saying what and on behalf of whom’ in the case studies. But this became strongly interpretive and the balance shifted toward more literal coding of the surface or manifest meaning of the reports’ text. We have retained two code sets that we identified as the strongest, in terms of evidence, of the interpretive categories: (1) a ‘visions of children’ set of codes covering the description of children in the report (ideas such as age, gender, disaffected or engaged, and ability, among others, and their relation to participation); (2) an open set of codes that captures any ‘miscellaneous assumptions’ we assessed as being made by the report. Alongside these we have more straightforward categories of codes: (3) ‘mechanisms of participation’ (and who initiated them, how par-ticipants are selected and who participants represent); and (4) ‘claimed or anticipated outcomes/purposes’ of participation. Our findings and discussion are structured around these categories.

Given that the SSEN case studies were produced at an embryonic stage of practitioner debates regarding pupil participation and citizenship education, an additional sample of case studies was selected from a more recent source. A further six case studies (three secondary schools and three primary schools) were accessed from Learning Teaching Scotland’s comprehensive source of citizenship case studies, readily available on the web (Learning and Teaching Scotland, 2006).2 The rationale for this was twofold. First of all, it was meth-odologically desirable to ensure we included a variety of case studies, covering a fairly extended time-frame. Second, inclusion of this more recently produced sub sample provided us with a comparative check on findings emerging from our original Ethos Network case studies. Although these more recent texts were constructed on a different editorial basis, they were broadly confirmatory when coded using the frame outlined above (and one primary school appears in both sets of texts so we had some handle on the influence of the different editorial approaches).



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In sum, we have undertaken a cross-case, thematic analysis of 14 web-published case studies concerning five secondary schools, seven primary schools (one of which provides two case study texts) and one special school. Our study is therefore limited by the presentation that follows as a cross-case thematic analysis; we lose the kinds of contextual richness (for example of how different institutions conceptualise ‘voice’) that are the source of additional explanatory power in, for example, ethnographic studies. In the kinds of texts studied here, the fine-grain of context is lacking. And the number of schools, and their balance across different sectors, raises questions about how represen-tative any claims we make can be. For both these reasons, we should re-iterate that our investigation is exploratory and raises issues rather more than it offers generalizable claims. Within these limitations, however, we identified strong patterns across the case studies that plausibly suggest that the cases are not idiosyncratic.

findings

The 14 case study reports (covering 13 schools) provide a rich and hitherto un-tapped resource for analysing what teachers understand as pupil participation and its purposes. However, given the small-scale nature and purposes of this research it is inappropriate to make any claims regarding emerging trends in our initial analysis.

mechanisms of participation

The small number of reports we studied describe a wide variety of mechanisms through which young people are described as participating. It is worth noting that, as with many such discourses, these texts tend to undermine academic consensus on the uses of words such as ‘participation’. For example, in writing their case studies, some schools have chosen to understand active participation and citizenship in terms of pupil decision-making per se and others in terms of involvement in pupil in decisions about their learning. These distinctions, which help frame the research discourse (for example Flutter and Ruddock [2004] and sections below), are also sometimes elided in the participation reported in the texts.

By far the most commonly mentioned mechanism, identified in all the case studies (primary, secondary and special schools), is the school council. The school council is discussed in detail in two case studies and mentioned-in-passing in others. Most reports give very little detail on which pupils are eligible to stand for election, how they become council members, who they represent or how they do so, how agenda items are raised and by whom, and how decisions are fed back to the school as a whole. Where detail is reported



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on such matters it seems intended to support the claim that the school council is an authentic body. The potential significance of this in the discourse is developed below in reporting on ‘outcomes’.

Most of the case studies focused on other mechanisms of participation. These included formal mechanisms: the co-option of senior pupils as members of school boards; school or year group forums; working groups to take forward par-ticular areas such as healthy eating. There were also less formal arrangements: focus groups or informal discussions; surveys of samples of pupils to seek opin-ions on a range of matters from catering to curriculum and teaching methods. A very wide range of other activity involving young people was recorded as being used to demonstrate a participative ethos in many of the case studies, especially for primary schools. These included: paired reading schemes, whereby more senior pupils helped younger pupils who were having reading difficulties; buddy schemes, again where older pupils in primary or secondary schools helped to smooth the induction of new pupils; peer counselling, particularly in the con-text of anti-bullying; home-school communication; a family club where pupils and parents/carers were expected to participate together; circle time; respon-sibilities for classroom tidiness; independent and after-school study; suggestion folders; monthly newsletters; involvement in national, industry and community links; setting and taking forward the curricular agenda with classes; and ‘community of enquiry’ approaches to classroom discussion.

In nearly all cases the mechanism itself is explicitly adult initiated or emerges in the passive voice: ‘there is a buddy scheme’. Within the mechanism, however, young people are evidently initiating activity either on their own or jointly with adults. This is an important issue, to which we will return.

claimed/anticipated outcomes of participation

A wide range of outcomes for pupil participation in decision-making was claimed in the case studies.

Where school councils were discussed in detail, outcomes were an important part of the discourse and are used to develop the idea of the council’s authen-ticity. In one case the council has an annual budget of £2000 and part of the explanation for this was to signal to the pupil population of the school in general that the council had power and could do things. The council had: initiated a review of the content of the personal and social education curriculum; altered discipline procedures; and was developing several improvements to the school environment (playground, toilets and lockers). This range of activity or influence is important in terms of Flutter and Ruddock’s (2004) ‘widening’ of pupil involvement from ‘uniform and lockers’ into teaching and learning. We are unable to say on the basis of information given in the reports whether council members experienced any conflict of loyalties between the needs of



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their peers and the needs of the system (Cotmore, 2004: 63), if and when they became more aware of both sets of needs. What we can say is that the reports convey a sense of the usefulness of councillors in conveying information to/from adult decision-makers and legitimizing decision-making such that they improved the running of the school:

These pupil councils provide a wealth of information and ideas. (Secondary/Case 1A)

Another reported set of outcomes from pupil councils is that councillors develop communication and negotiating skills and self confidence. The emphases on the existence of (1) practical outcomes that affect the wider school community and (2) on council post-holder development, however, avoid the issue of whether the council mechanism provides the latter, participatory, outcomes to the large numbers of young people who are not council members. Several schools, though, were aware of the need to expand participatory activity (see below) and one primary school provided detail of council selection procedures along with a variety of other, mutually exclusive, roles such as house-captaincy, Eco-School Committee, prefects and junior road-safety officers-the point being made that including as wide a range of pupils as possible in some participatory role was considered important.

Perhaps it is the recognition of limitations of council activity (including that of inclusion) that has resulted in the studied texts’ great range of other participatory mechanisms. What are the outcomes of these other mechanisms?

One major theme in primary school case studies was improved behaviour, engagement, motivation and attendance. The following extracts from different cases give a flavour of these.

Happier, quieter lunchtimes. (Primary/Case 1B).

[We] have not excluded any pupils for two years. (Primary/Case 1C)

I was able to form positive relationships throughout the school. (Primary/Case 1D: staff comment)

Typically, this was understood and expressed in terms of developing a sense of collective and individual responsibility for behaviour, and of internalising these values:

But we also need to help pupils to internalise the values that we are promoting so that they want to do better because it feels right to them. A counselling approach that hands the responsibility for behaviour back to pupils themselves eventually does result in better behaviour, raised self-esteem and feeling fully part of the school community. (Primary/Case 1C)

We will argue below that this focus on what might be described as ‘socialization’ in primary schools might be understood in terms of such schools’ understandings of their role and their construction of ‘children’.



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Other important themes in the discourse on outcomes, which cross all the kinds of school represented, included the development of a range of skills such as listening, communication, problem solving, working in a team via curriculum projects, and exercising choice. And there were many references to improved pupils’ self-esteem, self-confidence, empowerment, agency and to generally ‘feeling good’. Several case studies mentioned resulting improvements in curricular attainment and achievement. Some case studies provided evidence in the form of direct quotations from pupils of the beneficial effects of particular kinds of pupil participation. Thus in terms of paired reading:

I used to never like reading out in class but now I can read fast so I don’t mind. (Secondary/Case 1A: S2 boy)

In most of the reports, however, we rely on the authorial voice as below:

The children developed confidence in communicating with adults as well as understanding better about what it takes to become a good citizen. (Primary/Case 1E)

Most case studies report that direct participation in the various mechanisms make pupils feel good about participating and glad that they have done so. This may well be connected to the reported feelings of self-esteem and self worth and may derive from the direct, tangible outcomes of participation. There are rare but important notes of caution: some primary children being overwhelmed by practical aspects of council membership; a secondary pupil who has ‘taken a bit of a pounding’ in a community of enquiry session. Neither is presented as involving lasting damage (and in the latter case this is claimed to be true be-cause of the safety provided by the mechanism itself).

Another articulated outcome is the beneficial pastoral effects of buddy schemes and peer counselling schemes in helping children settle in to new schools and protecting them from bullying or intimidation. There are several quotations from buddies and their ‘buddettes’ about such beneficial effects. It is interesting that the reports seldom go beyond these issues to raise more fundamental questions about the nature of the school and pupil environment that might make these schemes necessary. On the few occasions they do so, the tendency is to refer to government policy on inclusion as raising new chal-lenges for schools. For example:

We also need to develop other strategies over the next few years to promote positive behaviour effectively and manage some of the more challenging behaviour that the inclusive agenda presents. (Secondary/Case 1A)

What is strikingly absent from the vast majority of case studies are mechan-isms where the purpose or outcome challenges the schools’ ways of doing things, which the literature (Alderson, 2000) describes as an important element of participation. Rather, the sense of outcomes in the discourse was about the



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mechanisms being used to enable the schools to do what they always do, but more efficiently and effectively, or, especially in some of the more recent cases, to deliver on a range of official agendas. The paired reading, buddy and peer counselling schemes, for example, can be seen as helping to develop capability for thoughtful and responsible participation in social life, and for helping others, particularly those in difficulty of one kind or another. The more formal mechanisms such as school councils and forums had purposes or outcomes that included improving curriculum, teaching and learning, as well as the school environment and pupil facilities. In this sense they were perhaps closer to Flutter and Ruddock’s (2004) proposition, of participation to improve learn-ing within existing systems, than they were to any idea of the development of political literacy and of asking questions about the legitimacy of the systems in the first place. Although there were some hints of movement toward the latter, it might be fair to interpret the tenor of the discourse as implying that the exist-ence of participatory mechanisms represented self-conscious radicalism on the part of the adults and teachers, not the pupils.

discussion – visions of children, the role of schooling, and participation

The inclusion, in teacher discourse about participation, of the above sets of mechanisms and outcomes might be understood if we had access to the writers’ visions or constructions of children and their assumptions about the nature and role of schooling. The following sections combine our more interpretive coding of the text, which formed one coding category relating to ‘visions of children’ and one open category of miscellaneous and outlying interpreted segments: ‘miscellaneous assumptions’.

age, development and participation

An important idea about children evident in the case studies is a model of participation based on chronological age and perceived immaturity/maturity of children. Developmental visions of children are a particularly explicit theme with regard to explanations of children’s participation in primary schools, al-though it is also implicit in secondary case studies. In some case studies, younger pupils (i.e. Primary years 1 and 2, five- and six-year-olds) are characterized as ‘too young’ to comprehend issues raised in the context of school councils. Participation is deemed unsuitable for younger pupils because of their cognit-ive immaturity and limited understanding. One case study explicitly addresses the challenging nature of involving younger, primary aged pupils. In this case study it was also noted that differential levels of participation, most notably with regard to the pupil council, resulted in certain power imbalances within the school:



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One quiet but burning issue was the increasing influence of senior pupils in making decisions that affected all pupils attending the school. (Primary/Case 1F)

Some parallels were found between the secondary and primary sector. Respon-sibility and greater levels of participation tend to be skewed towards older pupils at the upper end of both the primary and secondary schools studied. This means that P6 and P7 pupils (10- and 11-year-olds) tend to dominate in accounts of participation in the primary sector case studies and pupils in exam years, including S4, S5 and S6 (15-, 16- and 17-year-olds), were identified as the main actors and beneficiaries of the personal outcomes of participation (see section above) in the secondary cases.

Only in the ‘Community of Enquiry’ case studies (from the more recent set of texts we analysed) did there appear to be no age component to the authors’ visions of children. One case study described the approach being used systematically from Primary 1 to Primary 7, the other to Secondary 5 classes, further claiming that:

A process which helps acquaint students with the civilised, democratic and constructive use of disagreement is a powerful tool which would be welcomed in any sphere of citizenship, whatever the age or social background of the subjects. (Secondary/Case 2A)

These cases are, however, the exception. While the primary school case studies tended self-consciously to justify the extent and nature of participation in terms of the age of the pupils, secondary schools appeared to take this age-prerequisite of participation for granted. In teacher discourse the level of pupil participation is linked with hierarchical and stage-based organisation of schools, so that re-sponsibility and engagement are associated with specific year groups at the upper end of the school. Despite the fact that a ‘sequential development’ vision of children is implied by this (in the case of several primary school cases it is explicit), we see that across primary and secondary schools (i.e. taking the child’s whole experience of schooling), the discourse is at odds with such a sequential vision of child development. Taking ‘participation’ as an independent idea, there is clearly a regression between institutions: at the point of primary–secondary transition the same (generic) child is viewed as the most competent social actor in the primary school cases and the least competent in the secondary cases. This raises interesting questions regarding the nature of school transitions and continuity in participation opportunities for pupils as they move across sectors, as well as raising questions about the intrinsic nature of primary and secondary schools as institutions. However, it also illustrates the hierarchical nature of schools as ‘total’ institutions – an oft voiced criticism from advocates of more democratic and widespread participation for all pupils (e.g. Maitles and Gilchrist, 2006). The case study writers’ visions of children conform to institutional boundaries rather than transgress them, which might support



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similar conformity-over-transgression in the mechanisms and outcomes of participation.

generic and differentiated views of children/young people

The generalized and undifferentiated category of ‘pupils’ is consistently adopted in the case studies, creating a homogeneous image of children and young people. Over-generalized concepts such as ‘pupils’ and ‘children’ ob-scure the fact that participation may be confined to particular groups of pupils (i.e. senior pupils) or regarded as inappropriate for others (i.e. shy and reserved pupils and 5- and 6-year-olds). We should perhaps not be surprised that little attention is paid to basic divisions such as gender, ethnicity and class in the case studies (Montgomery, 2005). Reference to other markers of difference such as ability, academic versus non-academic pupils, as well as disaffected students, are also less evident. Yet where these do occur, reference to different constituencies of pupils offers insights into teacher perspectives on the purpose of pupil participation and in what counts as pupil voice.

In primary school case studies the following categories of children were mentioned with regard to participation:

• Problematic boys who benefit from supporting younger pupils in a school reading scheme.

• Confident and shy pupils/enthusiastic and less eager pupils.

In secondary school case studies the following categories of young people were mentioned with regard to participation:

• disaffected pupils;• academic pupils;• senior pupils including pupils in S4, S5 and S6, undertaking exams, in

addition to a few willing senior pupils in S6 who were young women.

Significantly much less is said about younger S1 and S2 pupils (11–13-year-olds) in relation to the secondary sector, confirming the age-stage visions discussed above. Distinguishing disaffected or difficult pupils in case studies is closely connected, in the discourse, to outcomes of participation that relate to behaviour and engagement.

participation, visions of children and the role of schools

‘Taking responsibility for self and others’ is both an input and outcome, in the discourse, in circular relation with participation: in primary and secondary school case studies participation resulted in improved or improving ‘behaviour’ in various ways, including notions of engagement with the institution, its



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boundaries and purposes; and we have seen above that, in institutional/teacher thinking (as represented by these texts) such ideas of maturity (particularly age) are prerequisites of participation in formal mechanisms. In primary school cases, participation (including taking greater responsibility for self-management) is seen as part and parcel of development and of socialisation. The sense we got from some primary school case studies was that participation is therefore in some essential way the meaning of education: a subtle inter-action of ‘development’, ‘conformity’ and ‘controlled emancipation’. These primary schools also understood this in terms of developing the citizens and communities of the future. By contrast, the secondary school discourse tends not to see the purpose of participation as something that lies beyond the school boundary in future citizens or communities (or, where it does, it does so more rhetorically) and neither does it use maturity and development as explicitly as the primary school discourse in justifying the hierarchy implied by age-stage visions of children in participation. Perhaps, then, because the secondary schools represented by these texts may not see basic socialization as a significant role for secondary schooling, so participation seems to be understood more as a matter of institutional effectiveness and equilibrium. Consequently, in some secondary schools’ case studies, an explicit link was made between pupil par-ticipation and the school improvement agenda.

At any rate, neither the primary nor secondary school discourses, then, suggest that participation is understood as involving the radical Freirian eman-cipation of an oppressed category of people: not ‘children’ in general, and not any other category such as race or gender. The interesting exception to this conclusion is the special school, whose contribution to the discourse, almost by definition, understands pupil participation (in society, i.e. inclusion) as the purpose of schooling, in the sense that marginality and exclusion of their pupils is the assumed starting point irrespective of age-related maturing processes.

Very often pupils in special schools are on the receiving end of kindness and hospitality – gifts, discos and outings, etc., so it is extremely beneficial for them to have the opportunity to return hospitality and do something actively for the community at large. This promotes feelings of mutuality, inclusion and the feeling of ‘being the same as everybody else’. The counterpart to this is that the community also recognises this mutuality and becomes aware that pupils with special educational needs have competencies and potential. (Special/Case Study 1G)

In the mainstream schools, there was little sense of children as marginalized or oppressed, so that participation is matter of an efficient institution (mainstream secondary) or child socialization (mainstream primary). These understandings of children and schooling support the non-radical nature of the reported out-comes of participation.



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pupil participation as on-going process

However, many of the case study writers understood their school’s participation activities as progressive and on-going processes. The discourse included some sense of the ups and downs of pupil participation, including raised and exceeded expectations of some staff who understood pupil participation in terms of risk. It is also clear that at times staff nervousness was justified but the overall trend was of adult satisfaction at the success of pupil participation initiatives. Also, there was related discourse to the effect that participatory initiatives were on-going, that confidence in them was growing, that more were planned and that some of their limitations were to be addressed (including the issues of the inclusion of a wider and younger range of pupils). This idea of progression is perhaps also linked to the common thread that participation is generally part of a set of wider, on-going, never-ending, agendas and developments such as behaviour management and inclusion. Such understandings may help explain both the institutional containment of participatory mechanisms and outcomes discussed above, but also the sheer diversity of mechanisms.

conclusion

We could summarize our analysis of this teacher to teacher discourse as follows. Mechanisms and outcomes of participation in the case studies are diverse but are presented as being congruent with the school’s institutional boundaries and purposes rather than transgressing them. The discourse can be understood as revealing some dominant understandings of childhood and schooling that deny any presumption of oppression that would lend pupil participation in-herent, radical, critical or political purposes for the students. However, pupil participation is nonetheless seen as something of a radical departure from the point of view of some of the adults involved, some of whom seem to be aware of critical tension in their on-going work on participation.

So what? Does our analysis of this teacher discourse offer any insight into the literature on citizenship-through-participation discussed in earlier sections? Before going on to tackle this question, we want to re-iterate that this study is a limited exploration of a set of individually ‘authored’ texts that report on a range of institutions that are self-selecting and have been sub-selected by our-selves without regard to concern for systematic representation. Moreover, the above sections report the kind of cross-case thematic analysis that produces claims that appear to be much more generalizable than the dataset allows. With that caveat in mind, what insight does the discourse offer the existing literature?



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participation per se

In the case of participation per se, we can ask whether the discourse demonstrates that children are initiators of activity (Hart, 1997), whether it lies close to the core business of schooling (teaching and learning in Flutter and Ruddock’s (2004) view) and whether participation is understood in terms of emancipation or radicalism (Fielding, 2004; Freire, 1970) or as a system of control.

Our assessment of the discourse in all but the latter of these questions is mixed. While it is inappropriate to generalise across cases, we can make some points about how the teachers who wrote these case studies understood par-ticipation. One primary school reported a six-month project for a single class, making a video focussing on citizenship. The video was produced by the class, using external professional partners and was eventually premiered at a Glasgow cinema. The report states:

We had already decided that that one of the central aims of the project was that it had to be child led. (Primary/Case 1E)

This sentence captures the essential theoretical paradox in mechanisms and projects to promote children’s participation and in curriculum frameworks that see children as citizens now rather than citizens in waiting (because the ‘we’ doing the deciding does not include the children at this level, even though the project is to be ‘child led’). This is the vexed area of who sets boundaries about both the means and substance of participation (writing on democratic schooling has developed principles and practices in this area [see Osler and Starkey, 2005, for a review]). Within this case study, participating pupils went on to choose the pedagogy by which the curriculum area was to be tackled and to reject the teachers’ initial groupings of children within the class. As with other case studies, curriculum and pedagogy are open to participatory mechanisms here. Yet it is difficult to envisage child-initiation of any mechanism of par-ticipation within formal schooling. Given a mechanism of participation, the agenda appears to be set in part by children in many of these case studies, but rarely exclusively:

Another group wanted to explore vandalism [in the film] and how we should persuade people not to vandalise our local community. It proved impossible for any of us to come up with a scenario that did not, at some level, glamorise or inadvertently promote vandalism to some of the prospective audience so, regretfully, it had to be dropped. (Primary/Case 1E)

In terms of the final question we are asking in this section, a Freirian eman-cipatory understanding of participation in schools is not evident in the dis-course and the construction of children is not as of an oppressed category. This is partly due to the over-generalised category ‘pupil’ but also a strongly held developmental justification for the hierarchical age-stage construction of the school as an institution. Finally, the discourse assumes that one of the



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purposes of schooling is to encourage pupils to accept societal norms rather than to question or challenge them. Citizenship education itself involves societal norms that might constrain the participatory challenge:

Education for citizenship has a number of general content requirements that might be seen as conflicting with the open-ended nature of ‘philosophy in schools’, or might in some circumstances prompt some teacher selection of stimulus material in the hope of eliciting ‘relevant’ discussion. (Primary/Case 2B)

participation as citizenship

What does our analysis tell us about participation as basis for citizenship education in these schools? We can ask whether participation is understood to: promote re-engagement with political processes; deal with values and morality; challenge the school’s perfomativity culture; respond to globalization; uphold children’s rights; over-represent formal mechanisms; be central to the purposes of the curriculum.

There is little evidence that participation in these case studies is intended to develop critical political literacy, as applied either to society as a whole, global-ized or not, or to the school as an institution. Indeed, we found that participation was linked with political literacy and understanding in only one case study. However, it is claimed that practical skills of engagement are developed, at least by those doing the participating, and that some sense of empowerment can emerge among pupils. But this is not empowerment in the face of a con-tested milieu. On the contrary, participating pupils are empowered to improve the functioning of the institution and are empowered more readily to fit in to it. The values and moral norms, concerning what constitutes ‘responsible be-haviour’ for example, are clearly built into the understandings of participation represented by these texts, and they are not contested by the adults writing the case studies. Nor is it expected that pupils will contest them (at least to the very limited extent that these texts can reveal such things). The relationship between the school’s values and society’s values is also viewed as unproblematic (although in a few case studies the suggestion was that participation in school-ing essentially improved local communities in a variety of ways). Explicitly or implicitly the discourse argues that the ability to fit in to the institution also improves the institution’s performance; in-as-much as values are involved, therefore, they are not reacting against the ‘performativity’ culture of schooling – quite the reverse. Given this analysis little if any case study text is expended on children’s rights as a driving force behind participation. This may be because, while children’s rights are widely acknowledged in general, their application in specific contexts, such as schooling, remains problematic.

It is worth noting that much of this is perhaps to be expected. The institution of schooling includes a relatively permanent adult staff, relatively transient



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pupil populations, and a variety of legal obligations upon the staff governing their relationship with the pupils (who are hardly legally enfranchised in the same way). It is difficult to envisage such institutions functioning in a climate of annual revolution as each new cohort of pupils arrives. Nonetheless, partici-pation in these case studies is contributing to active citizenship as envisaged in the Scottish curriculum. Although school council and other formal mechan-isms are acknowledged by most of the case studies (in keeping with Osler and Starkey’s [2005] review), many discussed in more detail a wider range of activity. This partly reflects the permissive approach to the implementation of active citizenship in Scottish schools. It may also be a product of a curriculum in which citizenship is central but has no identifiable locus and is left to colon-ise the school’s activity under the direction of the school. We have noted that there may be a danger that citizenship education through participation therefore becomes non-transgressive of the institution. On the other hand such non-transgressive participation could be argued to be at least realistic of individuals’ relations with the state and other institutions (and therefore might even avoid a sense of disempowerment being experienced upon leaving school). More positively, though, it seems to us that there is potential for the mechanisms of participation reported in these case studies to become more transgressive as they develop, as participation feeds the desire to participate. This ‘working from the inside’ might ultimately deliver more ‘real’ voice over time than an alternative attempt to impose revolutionary structures on existing institutions. We have noted that the case studies: describe activity as progressing; demonstrate that participatory mechanisms deliver beyond staff’s (risk-averse) expectations; discuss widening the franchise, acknowledge extra-institutional drivers, and other such power-relevant matters. While the case studies may very well represent schools that are ahead of the game when it comes to participation, they also begin to illuminate teachers’ accounts of how schools are fairing in a climate where education for citizenship is firmly on the Scottish policy agenda.

(1) Nurseries and other educational establishments were also included. ‘School’ is used as a convenient shorthand.

(2) Learning and Teaching Scotland is Scotland’s main curriculum development and support organisation and shares the national educational improvement effort.

referencesAlderson, P. (2000) School students’ views on school councils and daily life at school.

Children and Society, 14, 121–34.Biesta, G. and Lawy, R. (2006) From teaching citizenship to learning democracy:

overcoming individualism in research, policy and practice. Cambridge Journal of Education, 36(1), 63–79.



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Burman, E. (1994) Deconstructing Developmental Psychology. London: Routledge.Carr, D. (2003) Values education in Scotland. In T.G.K. Bryce and W.M. Humes (eds)

Scottish Education, pp. 323–30. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Cotmore, R. (2004) Organisational competence: the study of a school council in action.

Children and Society, 18, 53–65.Fielding, M. (2004) Transformative approaches to student voice: theoretical

underpinnings, recalcitrant realities. British Educational Research Journal, 30(2), 293–311.

Flutter, J. and Ruddock, J. (2004) Consulting Pupils: What’s in it for Schools? London: RoutledgeFalmer.

Freire, P. (1970) Pedagogy of the Oppressed. London: Continuum Publishing.Hart, R. (1997) Children’s Participation. The Theory and Practice of Involving Young

Citizens in Community Development and Environmental Care. London: Earthscan.HMIe (2003) How Good is Our School? Education for Citizenship. Edinburgh: HM

Inspectorate of Education.James, A. and Prout, A. (1990) Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood. Basingstoke:

Falmer.James, A. H. and James, A. (2001) Tightening the net: children, community, and

control. British Journal of Sociology, 52(2), 211–228.Jenks, C. (1996) Childhood. London: Routledge.Learning and Teaching Scotland (2002) Education for Citizenship in Scotland: A Paper

for Discussion and Development. Dundee.Learning and Teaching Scotland (2006) has a large number of case studies amongst its

support materials. Online: http://www.LTScotland.com/ citizenship [accessed 30 June 2006].

Maitles, H. and Gilchrist, I. (2006) Never too young to learn democracy!: a case study of a democratic approach to learning religious and moral education (RME) secondary class in West of Scotland. Educational Review, 58(1): 67–85.

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Morrow, V. (2006) Understanding gender differences in context: implications for young children’s everyday lives. Children and Society, 20(2), 92–104.

Osler, A. and Starkey, H. (2005) Education for democratic citizenship. British Educational Research Association. Online: http://www.bera.ac.uk/pdfs/OslerStarkeyBERAReview2006.pdf [accessed 14 March 2006].

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Stasiulis, D. (2002) The active child citizen: lessons from Canada. Citizenship Studies, 6(4), 507–38.

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correspondenceHamish Ross, Moray House School of Education, University of Edinburgh, Thomson’s Land, Holyrood Road, Edinburgh EH8 8AQ, UK. [email: [email protected]]



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