Conference Agenda

The educational research and teacher communities widely support the idea that education is a valuable tool for improving society; thus, children should be educated to participate in these improvements. This notion becomes evident in children's human rights education (CHRE), where young children should learn to respect and uphold their own and the rights of others to build and maintain a culture of human rights. Alongside this support, there is uncertainty about what content children should and can learn in their human rights education (Quennerstedt et al., 2025). Through the topic of solidarity, this article aims to problematise the engagement of children in defending human rights issues as part of the educational content at the early childhood education.

Thematising solidarity in early childhood education (ECE) can involve developing children’s capacities for initial societal responsibility and social readiness to act (Ärlemalm-Hagsér, 2024). As large-scale organisations often arrange and receive funds collected through solidarity projects in early childhood education, scholars are concerned that it might displace alternative approaches to address need and create a value conflict between the educational institution and the organisations (Power & Taylor, 2018). Another concern is that organisations might use children as instruments to achieve their good intentions, thereby instrumentalising children (Rosenberg, 2024). Instrumentalisation can occur in tokenistic participation processes (Body et al., 2020). These concerns become particularly salient as it has become commonplace for educational institutions to serve as intermediaries in fundraising for organisations (Body et al., 2020; Oguro & Burridge, 2016; Power & Taylor, 2018). At the same time, Scholars from Norway, Sweden and the UK argue that solidarity projects are beneficial for citizenship educations: such as global citizenship (Bakken & Børhaug, 2009; Jermstad et al., 2020; Smith, 2012) and philanthropic citizenship (Body, 2024). Solidarity work is considered to have an important role in preparing children for a world in which political, cultural and economic globalisation processes link ethnic groups and territories closer together (Bakken & Børhaug, 2009, p. 16). As well as create awareness of others’ needs and bind ECE settings together as a community (Power & Taylor, 2018). Thereby, fostering a sense of community through the acknowledgement and facilitation of the needs and aspirations of others.

Against this backdrop, it is interesting to discuss solidarity in light of Hannah Arendt’s view on young children learning to take societal responsibility. Arendt (1954) argue that education is a place for maturation and becoming familiar with the world, and not assuming responsibility for it. The latter belongs to the political public realm, a space for accountability. As the title of this article suggests, the central point for discussion is whether fundraising, as an act of solidarity, can be part of children’s human rights education. In this paper, I analysis two educational materials that teachers can use to thematise solidarity in early childhood education. Two very distinct organisations have produced these materials, and they approach fundraising as an act of solidarity in different ways. The following research questions guide the analysis: how is solidarity expressed and how are acts of solidarity legitimised in the educational materials? By illuminating and problematising the engagement of children in solving societal problems, the paper contributes to discussion about developing young children’s action competence for human rights at the early childhood education level, or their capacitation to act (Quennerstedt et al., 2025). It further contributes with knowledge about different organisations’ involvement of children in advocating for human rights and taking societal responsibility as child human rights defenders (CHRD) (Lundy et al, 2024).

Few educational domains expose tensions between children's rights and parental authority as starkly as sexuality education (Marshall, 2025). As a uniquely contested site where questions of knowledge, morality, agency, and childhood innocence intersect, sexuality education becomes an important crossroads for critical considerations of rights and representation (Robinson & Bengtsson, 2024). This paper examines how these tensions manifest across two jurisdictions, Ireland and Northern Ireland, where shared histories of religious influence over education produce strikingly divergent contemporary trajectories.

Drawing on Bacchi's (2012) "What's the Problem Represented to be?" (WPR) framework, we analyse how young people are represented within sexuality education policy discourse across both jurisdictions from the 1990s to present. We interrogate how "the problem" of sexuality education is positioned, what assumptions underpin these constructions, whose voices are privileged or silenced, and what effects these representations produce. Historically, both jurisdictions positioned young people primarily as vulnerable moral subjects requiring protection from sexual knowledge (Nolan, 2018). Early sexuality education policy in Ireland is heavily influenced by Catholic Church authority. By the 1990s, rising concerns about HIV/AIDS shifted this to positioning young people as "at-risk bodies" simultaneously vulnerable to and reckless about pregnancy and STIs. The dominant solution remained abstinence, with comprehensive information deemed too dangerous for young people to possess (Kiely, 2023). Similarly, Northern Ireland's sexuality education emerged within Christian ethos requirements that positioned sexuality within heteronormative marriage frameworks, emphasizing "deferment of sexual activity" and "abstinence as positive option" (Keating, 2023).

Neither jurisdiction in this case positioned young people as rights-bearing agents with legitimate participation in their own education. The dominance of religious patronage (Ireland) and Christian ethos requirements (Northern Ireland) operated as structural mechanisms through which cultures of limitation were enforced. This granted religious authorities discretionary power over curriculum implementation and positioned young people as subjects of adult moral guardianship rather than autonomous rights-holders.

More recently, policy rhetoric in both jurisdictions has shifted toward positioning young people as "informed decision-makers" and "sexual citizens with rights," yet this shift has produced strikingly divergent trajectories. Ireland's 2019 NCCA Review explicitly positioned young people as key stakeholders, with young people themselves reframing "the problem" as curriculum that was "too little, too late, too biological" shifting the deficit from youth behavior to institutional failure. The resulting Junior and Senior Cycle SPHE curricula now include content on consent, queer identities, mutual pleasure, and reproductive rights. In contrast, Northern Ireland's trajectory demonstrates how organized conservative resistance has reversed progressive policy commitments, returning sexuality education to its historical forms. The 2025 removal of trans guidance and persistent abstinence-based approaches demonstrate how similar cultural contexts produce divergent outcomes.

Crucially, both jurisdictions share a fundamental paradox: while young people are rhetorically repositioned as rights-holders, structural features remain unchanged. School ethos provisions (both jurisdictions) and parental withdrawal rights continue to subordinate children's participation rights. This reveals that young people's rights remain conditional on adult permission across both contexts, even as international rights-based frameworks gain traction and policy rhetoric becomes more progressive (Curvinho & Fischer, 2014).

This paper contributes to Network 25's call by interrogating precisely how national education policies navigate (or sidestep) tensions between children's rights and parental rights in this most contested of educational domains. We examine what happens when children's rights discourse is weaponized to restrict rather than expand young people's access to sexuality education, how power and ideology shape what counts as legitimate knowledge about children's sexuality and rights, and what responsibilities researchers bear when rights discourse is invoked to legitimise or delegitimise evidence-based educational practices. This comparative analysis reveals how cultural, religious, and political contestation shapes the very boundaries of what children's rights mean in practice.

Abstract

Traditionally, the classroom was imagined as a sacred pedagogical space in which teacher authority was taken for granted, supported by long-standing cultural expectations that teachers embody moral authority and uphold classroom order. Yet contemporary schooling is undergoing a profound paradigm shift under the influence of human-rights jurisprudence and procedural accountability. In this environment, teachers’ disciplinary authority is no longer treated as an inherent entitlement; instead, it becomes a conditional authorization—one that must be justified, documented, and aligned with legally protected student rights. This transformation generates a core tension between legal norms that demand clarity, neutrality, and proportionality, and the complex realities of classroom life where discipline often unfolds through rapid judgments under time pressure. While legislators and policy discourses increasingly foreground student protection, teachers are expected to sustain instructional order amid persistent classroom disruptions that erode teaching quality and intensify emotional exhaustion (Hopman et al., 2018). The central problem, therefore, is how teachers can maintain order and educational meaning when professional discretion is increasingly constrained—and retrospectively evaluated—through legalistic frameworks.

Existing literature offers key lenses on discipline and disruption, yet it also points to a disconnect between classroom dynamics and legal governance. From a normative perspective, compliance is shaped less by punitive severity than by students’ perceptions of legitimacy and fairness (Way, 2011). In parallel, interactionist work suggests that disturbances are co-constructed through teacher–student interactions and the ongoing interpretation of what counts as “disruptive” in a given classroom ecology (Eckstein, 2019). These insights underscore that discipline is contextual and relational—precisely what makes it difficult to translate into stable legal categories.

In Taiwan, this translation challenge is concentrated in the Campus Incident Resolution Committee (CIRC), where classroom interactions must be converted into legally defensible evidence. As disputes escalate into petitions and administrative litigation, the same incident is re-written through judicial logics of legality, procedural justice, and proportionality. Yet how these layers collectively reshape the meaning of “appropriate discipline,” and what kinds of pedagogical rationality can cross the threshold of legal recognition, remain under-examined.

Accordingly, this study asks: (1) How does the legal system demarcate the boundary of “appropriate” discipline in teacher–student disputes? (2) What forms of pedagogical rationality are validated, reduced, or rejected as cases move across institutions? The study employs qualitative textual analysis of a multi-layered corpus, including administrative court judgments, petition decisions, and CIRC investigative reports, to examine the process of legal reconstruction—how decision-makers interpret teacher intent, student reaction, and contextual constraints, and how they operationalize proportionality when weighing educational purposes against rights-based concerns.

Preliminary analysis reveals a structural discrepancy between normative legal requirements and classroom practices. First, the erosion of procedural justice—particularly neglect of students’ right to be heard—weakens the “filtering mechanism” that should prevent arbitrary judgments, producing decisions that rely on stigmatizing prejudgments rather than fact-sensitive assessment (Shen & Li, 2006). Second, teachers’ emotional catharsis may replace deliberative professional discretion: discipline is framed as a release or defensive reaction rather than a pedagogically reasoned intervention, making it more vulnerable to legal disqualification. The study argues that for discipline to be both educationally meaningful and legally defensible, it must move beyond narrow deterrence logic by restoring procedural fairness and strengthening teacher–student relationships, reflecting research on the relational foundations of classroom management (Wettstein et al., 2021). By conceptualizing discipline disputes as a “translation” between law and education, this research offers a framework for understanding teacher professionalism under intensified legalization and for diagnosing where institutional design amplifies, rather than resolves, the law–practice gap.

Although few people openly dispute the importance of children’s rights, specialists warn that political and crisis-related pressures can push children’s rights out of focus—particularly the right to participate in decisions that affect them (ChildFund Alliance et al., 2021; UNICEF, 2025). Article 12 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) requires that children can express their views and that adults give those views due weight (UNCRC, 1989). In schools, participation is therefore not an optional “extra”, but a rights-based duty that needs to be implemented in everyday educational practice (Lundy, 2007). Yet participation often remains fragile: pupils may be asked for opinions while experiencing limited influence on decisions, and participation may not be equally accessible to all pupils (ChildFund Alliance et al., 2021).

Schools are frequently encouraged to organise participation through formal structures such as pupil councils. However, research shows that councils alone do not guarantee meaningful participation when they are disconnected from classroom practices, informal school life, and governance routines (Cross et al., 2014; Graham et al., 2018). This points to three recurring challenges at the intersection of children’s rights and education: (1) inclusiveness (whose perspectives enter participation spaces), (2) sustainability (how participation becomes embedded in routines and roles), and (3) policy impact (whether pupils’ perspectives actually shape decisions).

This paper reports empirical findings from the GOTALK project (September 2023–August 2025), a cross-national project that tested and refined a prototype method for strengthening pupil participation through and beyond pupil councils. We focus on action research trajectories in four Flemish schools in Antwerp (two primary; two secondary). Schools entered the trajectories with their own questions about pupil participation and aimed to strengthen at least one of the three challenges (inclusiveness, sustainability, policy impact). The prototype method was designed as a practice-oriented approach to generating and mobilising knowledge in real school settings (Abma et al., 2017; Friedman & Rogers, 2009).

Conceptually, we combine Lundy’s space–voice–audience–influence framework (Lundy, 2007) with an analytic focus on gaps between espoused theories and theories-in-use (Argyris & Schön, 1974; Savaya & Gardner, 2012). This lens clarifies how schools can endorse participation rhetorically while everyday routines reproduce hierarchy.

Findings are presented through three clusters of critical incidents. First, adult decision-maker presence mattered for “audience” and “influence”, but also created risks of adults abusing childrens voices for their own purposes (Lundy, 2007). In one secondary school, a principal’s structured dialogue with pupils—paired with clearer preparation, fewer agenda items, and school-wide feedback—strengthened perceived influence and led to governance adjustments. In one primary school, a unilateral budget decision taken “on behalf of” pupils undermined trust and exposed opaque decision-making procedures.

Second, schools shifted from a pedagogy of teaching to a pedagogy of participation by reflecting on micro-practices that encode hierarchy (Graham et al., 2018). Reconfiguring space and interaction (e.g., sitting arrangements; negotiated norms of address) supported more equitable deliberation.

Third, inclusiveness depended on practices connecting council members with non-members. Peer-to-peer interviews and participatory documentation (e.g., a “living wall”) broadened perspectives informing council proposals (Bjartveit et al., 2019; Wang & Burris, 1997), while everyday procedures (visibility, time, corridor rules) shaped who could engage. Across cases, inclusiveness, sustainability and policy impact proved mutually dependent.

The paper contributes an empirically grounded, rights-explicit and adaptable method for organising participation in schools and shows how “influence” can be strengthened beyond token consultation (Lundy, 2007), advancing Network 25’s agenda at the intersection of children’s rights and education.