Symposium Set I / 21
Working with Children's Rights in Early Childhood
ALINE COLE-ALBAECK
Centre For Research in Early Childhood & Birmingham City University, United Kingdom
This PhD study examines the concept of 'Child Rights Pedagogy' in ECEC. Although there is a growing corpus of children’s rights research, research on rights in ECEC is still limited and has tended to focus on participation (Reynaert et al., 2009); (Quennerstedt, 2011, 2015). Building on this body of work my study explores a broader notion of what rights respecting practice could entail. My philosophical approach is deontological and sociological as I recognise children as a social group with their own set of interests and rights (Morrow and Pells, 2012; Freeman, 2012). To explore how two-year-olds experience rights, an approach in line with ''Critical Incident Technique'' (Flanagan 1954; Webster & Mertova, 2007) was used, to identify emotionally charged events as representative of what is important to children in their lifeworld’s. I am looking at how these events, together with data from children, parents and staff, are related to children’s rights, and using the sociologist Frezzo’s (2015) notion of Human Rights ‘bundling’, bundling identified children’s rights around pedagogical issues. I followed University, EECERA and BERA guidelines informing ethical issues such as confidentiality, negotiated assent, “ethical symmetry” (Christensen & Prout, 2002) and children’s silences (Spyrou, 2016). My data suggests that, just like the UNCRC has 4 Guiding Principles for children 0-18, there may be rights that could be bundled and seen as Guiding Principles for working from a child rights perspective in ECEC. This approach bridges theory and practice, making children’s rights more accessible and relevant to pedagogical practices in early childhood.
Keywords: children's rights, pedagogy, UNCRC, sociology, two-year-olds
