Discourses/6. England: The Position of Children’s Rights in the Discourse on Citizenship. The Case of the Early Years Foundation Stage for England

This article explores how three well-known conceptual frameworks view child development and how they assume particular figurations of the child in the context of the South African National Curriculum Framework for Children from Birth to Four. This new curriculum is based on a children’s rights framework. The capability approaches offer important insights for children’s rights advocates, but, like psychosocial theories of child development, assumes a ‘becoming-adult view of child’, which poses a serious threat to children’s right to genuine participation. They also share the exclusive focus on understanding development as located ontologically in the individualised human. In contrast, critical posthumanism queers humanist understandings of child development and reconfigures subjectivity through a radical philosophical decentring of the human. The relevance of this shift for postdevelopmental child in the context of the new South African early years curriculum is threaded throughout the article. A posthuman reconfiguration of child subjectivity moves theory and practice from a focus on assessing the capabilities of individual children in sociocultural contexts to the tracing of material and discursive entanglements that render children capable. This onto-epistemic shift leads to the conclusion that the National Curriculum Framework for Children from Birth to Four requires a fourth theme (with guiding principles), which would express a multispecies relationality and an ethics of care for the human as well as the nonhuman.

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Enabling children’s rights in Wales with early years professionals

The Routledge International Handbook of Young Children’s Rights ◽

10.4324/9780367142025-22 ◽

2019 ◽

pp. 260-275 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Nichola Welton ◽

Glenda Tinney ◽

Sioned Saer

Keyword(s):

Children's Rights ◽

Early Years ◽

Children’S Rights

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Democracy or legacy? Boys’ views on early literacy in three Maltese state schools

Journal of Early Childhood Research ◽

10.1177/1476718x211051330 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 1476718X2110513

Author(s):

Charmaine Bonello

Keyword(s):

Early Literacy ◽

Formal Education ◽

Children's Rights ◽

Early Years ◽

Children’S Rights ◽

Formal Schooling ◽

Reading And Writing ◽

Writing Practices ◽

British Colony ◽

State Schools

Malta, a former British colony, has inherited a legacy of formal education, which remains stubbornly in place even after almost 60 years of independence. Similarly, persistent are arguments in research and policy highlighting democracy and children’s rights in early years practice and boys’ underachievement in literacy. This paper examines 5- to 6-year-old boys’ perspectives about their schooled reading and writing experiences in three Maltese state schools through the dual lenses of children’s rights and democratic practice to create new understandings of these widely discussed longstanding phenomena. The paper discusses themes emerging from three focus group interviews which were part of a broader mixed-methods phenomenological doctoral study. Findings revealed that most boys experienced undesirable reading and writing practices, pointing to a need to rollback the highly formalised approach to literacy practised in many early years of educational settings in Malta. This paper questions whether countries like Malta will remain paralysed by a legacy of early formal schooling or move forward to an actual realisation of children’s rights through sustained democratic early childhood paedagogies.

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