We discussed my Annual Progress before submitting the form to the University. And what a year it has been! Some important aspects were:
Having taken the time to critically explore philosophical and theoretical positions I came to a major paradigm shift in the course of this past year as I realised that with a deeper understanding of methodological issues, my research is firmly a qualitative study. I am therefore redesigning my Children’s Rights Rating Scale (developed for my MA research) as an involvement tool instead, as I am no longer interested in rating rights-based practice, but in exploring and understanding how children’s rights are engaged with and negotiated in early childhood.
Another major challenge for me was, in the face of criticism for supporting the UNCRC as an universal treaty, finding my theoretical position in the wider international human rights framework. Having mapped out the core international treaties I now have a firmer ground to stand on when defending the UNCRC and a renewed commitment to children’s rights within this framework following the P-model classification.
It has also stricken me in the course of my writing this past year how I do not like thinking in hierarchical terms. When unpicking participation I wrote about how I question seeing levels of participation as a ladder, following Hart’s (1992) hierarchical model, but much prefer Treseder’s (1992) metaphor of a wheel. I seem to keep coming back to the metaphor of the wheel, as I did when looking at various research methods and also classifications of rights. I am not promoting “anything goes” relativism but within specific discourses, valuing different methods, categories or classifications as complementary rather than competing or inferior.
