John I'Anson

Beyond the Disneyesque: children's participation, spatiality and adult-child relations

The article describes a case study of children and young people’s participation and the attendant effects on professional practice and child-adult relations. The authors consider the findings under four headings: professional learning, child-adult relations, childhood memories and the spatial dimensions of change. Evidence indicates that adults and children were finding new ways of working and relating and that these processes were inherent in efforts to reconfigure space. The analysis shows how adult and child identification, relations and associated constructions of childhood and adulthood were connected. We argue that changes occurred in and through the shaping of real and imagined places.

Beyond the Child's Voice: Towards an Ethics for Children's Participation Rights

This article begins by identifying some of the reasons why children are marginalised in adult social and theoretical contexts. Western styles of thinking, whether of a liberal or post-structuralist persuasion, install what the anthropologist Tim Ingold refers to as a ‘logic of inversion’ that variously complicates, translates and blocks possibilities for the actualisation of childrens participation rights. A key strategy to redress the childs social exclusion has been attending to ‘the childs voice’ in both political and research contexts. Whilst this has led to childrens voices becoming heard and innovations in research methods, the extent to which the definition of ‘the childs voice’ steers clear of the difficulties identified in the first part of this article is questionable. A significant concern is the extent to which researchers, as authors of texts, reinscribe adult interests in the crafting of ‘the childs voice’ as it appears in their writing. Having problematised some of the ways in which ‘the childs voice’ has been mobilised in research, the article then addresses some of the ethical responsibilities for adults in moving beyond these limitations. Taking up such responsibility, it is argued, involves new forms of ethical practice that acknowledge the others subjectivity and the limits of knowing that this implies, together with writing practices that interrupt the appropriation and colonisation of the childs experience.

RE: pedagogy – after neutrality

Within the UK and in many parts of the world, official accounts of what it is to make sense of religion are framed within a rhetorics of neutrality in which such study is premised upon the possibility of dispassionate engagement and analysis. This paper, which is largely theoretical in scope, explores both the affordances and the costs of such an approach which has become ‘black boxed’ on account of the work that it achieves. A series of new orientations within the academy that are broadly associated with post‐structuralist philosophies, feminist and post‐colonial studies, together with insights into science and technology studies, question the plausibility of these claims for neutrality whilst in turn raising a series of new questions and priorities. It therefore becomes necessary to rethink and reframe what it is to make sense of religious and cultural difference after neutrality. The gathering and coordination of new planes of sense‐making that are responsive to an emergent series of epistemological, ontological and ethical orientations are considered. Some of the distinctive pedagogical implications of such an approach that engages material practice, difference and uncertainty are then entertained.

Mapping the subject: student teachers, location and the understanding of religion

Religious education students on initial teacher education programmes work in both school and university contexts that might be expected to produce different accounts of the nature of religion. This article explores the contested nature of religion and the ways in which student teachers negotiate their own understanding of subject knowledge. A small case study within a Scottish context is considered in which schools are seen to occupy spaces which privilege a modernist approach to subject knowledge in contrast with the post-structuralist accounts of religion that students may encounter at university. Consideration is given as to how six third-year student teachers negotiate the differences between these two contexts. This study has implications for the kind of support offered to students by initial teacher education institutions, where such differences obtain, and potentially raises questions concerning the future construction of religion in schools.

‘religion’ In Educational Spaces: Knowing, Knowing Well, And Knowing Differently

The focus of this article is how ‘religion’, as a materially heterogeneous concept, becomes mobilized in different educational spaces, and the kinds of knowing to which this gives rise. Three ‘case studyish’ illustrations are deployed in order to consider how religion and education produce kinds of knowing which may — or may not — involve knowing well and knowing differently. We argue that it is necessary to attend to both the understanding of religion that is being deployed and the specific educational imaginary within which such knowing takes place.

The UNCRC – the Voice of Global Consensus on Children’s Rights?

ABSTRACT That the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) encompasses contradictions is known. Despite this knowledge, attention to conflicting aspects within the convention is limited, and instead, the assumption that the convention represents an international consensus on the meaning of children’s human rights seems to be widespread in policy and academic work. Furthermore, the available literature within the field of children’s rights is largely silent regarding precise and elaborated knowledge about the inherent contradictions within the UNCRC. This paper expands upon and specifies the knowledge about consensus and inconsistencies within the convention. Through an in-depth study of the drafting process of the UNCRC, the paper identifies and displays both contradictions within the convention, and ways in which the text of the convention can be seen to express consensus. The analysis shows how a certain consensus was produced for respectively civil and political rights, and socio-economic rights, but that different and inconsistent children’s rights logics underlay the formation of these respective consensus-formations.