Conference Agenda

Objectives

This article proposes alternative conceptualizations of the collective aspect of children’s participation rights and explores their implications for education policy. It identifies a lacuna in current literature: the theoretical ambiguity surrounding collective participation. By suggesting three distinct conceptualizations, this study contributes to the theoretical discourse and offers a clearer framework for educational implementation.

Theoretical Framework

The Collective and Individual Aspects of Participation Rights

While Article 12 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (hereinafter: UNCRC) arguably refers to the individual child (United Nations, 1989), participation was soon understood as also applying to collective contexts, as evidenced by Hart's (1992) "ladder of participation", which discusses collective contexts exclusively.

Although the distinction between the collective and individual aspects of participation rights was acknowledged by the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child (hereinafter: CRC Committee) as a "relevant distinction" (CRC Committee, 2009, para. 9), the legal analysis provided in the same document explicitly refers only to the individual aspect (CRC Committee, 2009, paras. 14-67), leaving the theoretical and practical meanings of the collective aspect unclear. Despite this lacuna, the study and implementation of participation rights in education tend to focus on collective participation, as elaborated in the next section.

Although some scholars reasserted this distinction, they still perceived collective and individual participation as aspects of a single right (e.g., Herbots & Put, 2015). While some studies explicitly focused on either its individual (Clark, 2017) or collective aspect (Hart, 1992; Lundy, 2018), the distinction between the two and the unique characteristics of each were never thoroughly explained.

Collective and Individual Participation in Education Research

Individual students can participate in schools in many forms, such as taking part in their own assessment (Charteris & Smardon, 2019). Yet, studies rarely focus on individual participation (for a notable exception, see Clark, 2017). Existing findings indicate that students are not listened to in disciplinary procedures (Perry-Hazan & Lambrozo, 2018) and that participatory disciplinary procedures can sometimes undermine individual participation and other rights (Author, 2023).

Collective participation is far more explored, and terms like "participation" and "student voice" are often perceived as referring only to collective decision-making (Holquist et al., 2023). Collective participation is prioritized in implementation as well. For instance, only one of the CRC Committee’s (2009) eight education-related recommendations addresses individual participation.

Two Different Rights?

Defining collective and individual participation as mere aspects of the same right creates significant theoretical and practical difficulties. For example, Lundy (2018) suggests that tokenism can sometimes be accepted, but only in collective contexts. Furthermore, while children are presumed capable of forming their own opinions in individual contexts (CRC Committee, 2009, para. 20), their capacity to do so in complex collective contexts is questionable (Lundy et al., 2024).

Applying individual participation rights to collective contexts creates unrealistic expectations, as consulting every child individually is often logistically impractical for schools and governments (see, e.g., CRC Committee, 2009, para. 127). Hence, collective participation often relies on representatives, which decouples the right holder from the child whose voice is heard (Holquist et al., 2023). This raises critical questions regarding power and the accountability of representatives to those most affected by the decisions (Author, 2024).

Theoretically, the two aspects stem from different foundations. The individual right parallels an adult’s freedom of choice in self-regarding matters, whereas collective participation corresponds to the right of suffrage and civic participation (Archard, 2020).

To summarize this section, conflating collective and individual participation leaves collective participation undertheorized, while allowing systemic negligence of individual participation rights. Therefore, this article argues that collective and individual participation rights are better perceived and studied as two distinct rights.

The UNCRC provides a legal and moral framework for recognising children as active participants in society. Article 12 affirms the child’s right to express views freely in all matters affecting them. However, the interpretation and implementation of this right have been shaped by adult-centric paradigms that privilege verbal articulation and rational decision-making (Lundy, 2007; Shier, 2001). Participatory models such as Hart’s Ladder and Shier’s Pathways have been widely adopted. Hart’s Ladder illustrates eight levels of children’s participation, ranging from tokenism to genuine child-initiated decision-making. Shier’s Pathways, on the other hand, offers five levels of participation supported by organisational commitments, focusing on creating opportunities for children’s voices to influence decisions. However, both models rely on a hierarchical logic that assumes agency is expressed through speech and structured choices, criteria that exclude infants, toddlers, and pre-verbal or non-verbal children.

Lundy’s (2007) model, which emphasises space, voice, audience, and influence, offers a more wholistic approach but is often misapplied as a checklist rather than a reflective tool. For children under three, the notion of “voice” must be expanded to include gestures, emotional expressions, and relational interactions (Clark & Richards, 2017; Alderson, 2010). This requires a shift from linguistic essentialism to multimodal conceptualisations of communication.

A growing body of literature challenges the verbal-centric view of participation. From earlier on, researchers (e.g. Flewitt , 2005; Clark, 2010; and Elfer, 2012) argue that young children communicate through a rich repertoire of non-verbal cues, including gaze, touch, movement, and affect. These forms of communication are not inferior to speech but demand interpretive sensitivity and ethical responsiveness from adults. Clark and Moss’s (2011) Mosaic approach exemplifies how visual and participatory methods can be adapted to engage young children meaningfully. However, even such innovative methods risk tokenism if they are treated as technical fixes rather than relational practices (Blaisdell, 2020).

Yet, despite this recognition, participatory research has become an orthodoxy that often prioritises methodological compliance over ethical praxis. For example, the field is influenced by task-based approaches such as drawings, photographs, visual tools, under the assumption that these methods democratise research. In reality, such practices frequently reproduce adult-centric agendas and fail to address the axiological and ontological complexities of researching very young children. Ethical protocols, meanwhile, have become increasingly procedural, focusing on informed consent, anonymity, and confidentiality as regulatory checkboxes rather than context-sensitive principles. This creates what Palaiologou (2016) terms “axiomatic antinomies,” where institutional ethics collide with the lived realities of research encounters.

If participatory rights are to be meaningful for all children, including those under three, research must move beyond tokenistic inclusion and interrogate the ethical, epistemological, and methodological foundations of participation. Thus paper responds to that challenge by presenting findings from a qualitative study.

The study addresses three core questions:

• What does participation mean for children under three?
• How can researchers achieve participation with children under three?
• What methods are currently used to implement participatory rights in research?

By critically analysing existing models, exploring alternative conceptualisations, and examining participatory practices, this paper argues that participation is not a fixed method but a relational stance, one that requires humility, reflexivity, and a willingness to listen to children in all their communicative forms. Building on previous work (Palaiologou 2014, 2019, 2020) it introduces three interrelated principles: ethical permeability, relatability, and otherness, as conceptual anchors for reconceptualising participation. These principles challenge the reduction of participation to procedural compliance and invite a paradigm shift: from participatory ideology to ethical praxis.

Children’s Human Rights Education (CHRE) is defined in the recent systematic review by Gillett-Swan et al. (2025) as “the formal and informal teaching and learning of children’s rights,” conceived as both part of and distinct from general human rights education, and shaped by the particular status of children as rights holders and learners. While the review emphasises the lack of conceptual clarity across the field, this definition establishes that CHRE requires environments in which children can meaningfully learn about, through, and for their rights. Building on this definitional foundation, the systemic CHRE theory proposed by Moody et al. (2025) articulates six interdependent components – aims, ends-in-view, the rights-holding learner, the rights-conscious educator, content, and rights-based processes – demonstrating that rights education relies on the coherence of pedagogical, relational, and structural dimensions within educational settings.

From this systemic perspective, school climate emerges as a critical mediating construct. Classic work by Cohen et al. (2009) defines it as the “quality and character of school life,” shaped by norms, values, interpersonal relationships, teaching and learning practices, and the organisational environment—dimensions that closely mirror those required for rights-based educational processes. More recent dimensional analyses, such as Lewno-Dumdie et al.’s (2020) review, consistently identify five core domains of school climate – safety, relationships, teaching and learning, the institutional environment, and school improvement processes – each of which directly intersects with the components of the CHRE model. This correspondence suggests that school climate is not merely contextual but structurally constitutive of CHRE: it shapes whether learners’ rights are protected and recognised, whether educators can act as rights-conscious practitioners, whether content about, through, and for rights can be enacted authentically, and whether aims and ends-in-view can be translated into lived experiences. In comparing the CHRE theory with dominant school climate models, school climate appears as the operational bridge through which CHRE’s systemic coherence can materialise in everyday school life.

Research also shows that school climate is experienced uniformly across student populations. Systematic reviews and large-scale studies show that students with disabilities consistently report more negative perceptions across all school-climate domains, and that an intersectional lens reveals even more complex patterns of marginalisation (Hunt et al., 2024). Likewise, significant racial and ethnic differences in climate perceptions, moderated by school-level diversity, indicate that school climate is not a neutral or universal construct but one shaped by structural inequities (La Salle et al., 2021; Parris et al., 2018). Students with emotional and behavioral disorders further report consistently lower perceptions across all domains (Gage et al., 2020). These findings suggest that traditional school-climate models risk obscuring group-specific experiences and may inadvertently sustain inequities. A rights-based approach therefore requires re-conceptualising school climate in ways that attend to diversity, recognise differential vulnerabilities, and foreground children’s varied positions as rights holders.

Learning environments are "the first pedagogical act" (Botta et al., 2017). They can facilitate or impede possible actions and shape children's experiences (Berti et al., 2019). Teacher preparation programs often overlook the physical classroom environment (Guardino & Fullerton, 2010). Teachers typically organize classroom spaces based on existing regulations (if any) and their beliefs, ideas, or preferences (Nyabando & Evanshen, 2021).

According to Thomas (2011) and Correia et al. (2023), research on children's participation has shifted from protectionist viewpoints to participatory paradigms that acknowledge children as social actors and rights holders. Children's participation in early childhood education (ECE) is not viewed as an individual ability or a predetermined activity, but it is a complex and context-dependent process shaped by social, relational, and institutional conditions (Shier et al., 2014). According to the new sociology of childhood, children are seen as active participants in their social environments, with agency demonstrated through daily activities, interactions, and engagements with materials and space (Corsaro, 2015; Percy-Smith, 2016).

Children’s participation in early childhood education is enacted through everyday, relational, and material practices. Participation emerges through children’s interactions with peers, materials, and space during play and communication (Nordtømme, 2012). In these interactions, children actively seek to exercise and negotiate control over their everyday lives, often sharing this control within peer cultures (Corsaro, 2015). From a relational perspective, space is not a fixed container but emerges through ongoing social relations and practices (Massey, 2005). Consequently, spaces of participation take multiple forms and are experienced differently depending on children’s positionalities and lived experiences (Ylikörkkö, 2022). Children’s own sense of participation is therefore a critical dimension of participatory practice in ECE (Kyrönlampi & Uitto, 2022). Everyday pedagogical contexts can offer meaningful opportunities for participation by responding to children’s initiatives, enabling agency, and supporting engagement in shared action (Correia et al., 2021; Venninen et al., 2014). At the same time, children’s participation is shaped by adult decisions and institutional practices. While children exercise agency, they remain dependent on adults and require protection, making early childhood education a space marked by ethical and ideological tensions (Prout, 2011; Ylikörkkö, 2022). Teachers influence participatory spaces not only through direct interaction but also through pedagogical planning and material organisation (Vuorisalo et al., 2015). As children gradually develop an understanding of the rules, resources, and expectations of ECE settings (Nordtømme, 2012), materiality becomes central to participation, as children form relationships not only with people but also with cultural and material artefacts (Kyrönlampi et al., 2021).

The study is theoretically grounded in two complementary frameworks. First, Gal’s ecological framework of child participation (2017) conceptualises participation as a process shaped by multiple ecological levels, including the person, microsystem, mesosystem, macrosystem, and the wider socio-political landscape. This framework enables participation to be examined beyond individual characteristics and the role of relationships, institutional arrangements, and broader policy contexts are emphasized. Second, Lefebvre’s theory of the production of space (1991) offers a lens for understanding learning environments as socially constructed spaces rather than neutral physical settings. Lefebvre’s spatial triad (1991) allows the study to examine how classrooms are designed, enacted through everyday practices, and experienced by children and adults over time. Together, these frameworks support a relational and contextual understanding of how early childhood classrooms are shaped through everyday participation. The purpose of this study is to examine how early childhood teachers conceptualise and design classroom learning environments, how children’s everyday participation is enacted within these spaces, and how adult-designed spatial arrangements interact with children’s lived experiences and agency.