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Full-Text Articles in Education
Imagining An Ideal School For Wellbeing: Locating Student Voice, Catharine A. Simmons, Anne Graham, Nigel Thomas
Imagining An Ideal School For Wellbeing: Locating Student Voice, Catharine A. Simmons, Anne Graham, Nigel Thomas
Professor Anne Graham
This article explores the significance of actively engaging with students in school about matters that concern them. The discussion draws upon data from a large-scale mixed methods study in Australia that investigated how ‘wellbeing’ in schools is understood and facilitated. The qualitative phase of the research included semi-structured focus group interviews with 606 students, aged between 6 and 17 years, which incorporated an activity inviting students to imagine, draw and discuss an ideal school that promoted their wellbeing. These data reveal how capable students are of providing rich, nuanced accounts of their experience that could potentially inform school improvement. While …
Progressing Children’S Participation: Exploring The Potential Of A Dialogical Turn, Anne Graham, Robyn Margaret Fitzgerald
Progressing Children’S Participation: Exploring The Potential Of A Dialogical Turn, Anne Graham, Robyn Margaret Fitzgerald
Professor Anne Graham
Children’s participation is increasingly ambiguous and contested. Such complexity emerges in response to its emancipatory possibilities as well as unresolved tensions and power practices. The authors argue that closer attention must now be given to the interpretative milieu of children’s participation, that is, to the act of dialogue that has emerged as central to the participatory process. They point to the need for a critical examination of dialogue in facilitating and resisting the recognition of children. The article concludes with a number of questions to be addressed, if a dialogic approach to participation is to be more fully realized.
Progressing Participation: Taming The Space Between Rhetoric And Reality, Anne Graham, Jenni Whelan, Robyn Margaret Fitzgerald
Progressing Participation: Taming The Space Between Rhetoric And Reality, Anne Graham, Jenni Whelan, Robyn Margaret Fitzgerald
Professor Anne Graham
Participation, as a social and political movement, continues to gain momentum, and the legal and sociological frameworks supporting the rights of children and young people to participate in various aspects of social life are now well established. Yet, there are gaps and silences behind the rhetoric of participation that beg closer scrutiny. Such analysis is important in ensuring “participation” is not un-problematically adopted by policy makers and practitioners without regard to the complex and competing agendas at work in its implementation or any clear evidence of the significance or outcomes for the young people involved. This paper explores some of …