Participation, Facilitation, and Mediation

Children and Young People in Their Social Contexts

Claudio Baraldi, Vittorio Iervese

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136316258
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Traditionally, children have been considered from a primarily developmental perspective, in need of education in order to achieve autonomy, growth, and eventually adulthood. Childhood studies have recently underlined an alternate way to look at children, starting from the consideration that children are competent social actors and can actively participate in social life. However, there has been relatively little attention paid to the ways in which adults can actively empower children's agency and participation. This book aims to highlight this important aspect, explaining the position of adults as facilitators and mediators in the process of constructing childhood.

1 Participation as Mediation and Social Learning

Empowering Children as Actors in Social Contexts

Barry Percy-Smith

INTRODUCTION

The participation of children and young people has overwhelmingly been influenced by Article 12 of the UNCRC which sets out the right of children to have a say in matters that affect them. In keeping with prevailing models of representative democracy in many European countries, children’s voices have in turn been facilitated through structures such as councils, youth parliaments or consultations to ensure their views and experiences are represented in local decision-making processes. Yet, increasingly critics have raised questions about the extent to which participation of this kind is meaningful and effective in terms of outcomes and benefits for decisionmaking for services and ultimately in the lives of young people (Cockburn 2005; Percy-Smith 2010a; Tisdall 2008).

In two recent pieces of evaluation of young people’s participation in local authorities in the UK (Percy-Smith 2009; Thomas and Percy-Smith forthcoming), evidence reveals that while young people are often ‘involved’ in a range of different ways, for example in training and recruitment, in developing information for young service users or in shadow structures such as youth parliaments and scrutiny committees, they were rarely involved directly in real time decision-making about service design, delivery and commissioning. In addition, young people identified the extent to which the process and experience of being involved is often of greater value for them (providing personal development opportunities) than impacting change, although they say that is important.

There are a number of problems with the way children’s participation is currently understood and enacted in Western European countries. First, there is an emphasis on public sector decision-making rather than wider spheres of participation of children and young people as citizens in everyday life arenas. This means that the context for participation is abstracted from young people’s everyday lives. Second, the agenda for participation tends to be adult and service driven meaning that participation tends to be for the purpose of ‘effective organisations and services’ rather than the flourishing of human communities (Fielding 2006). This means that the raison d’être of participation is de facto about services and decisions rather than people’s capacity and wellbeing as citizens. Third, within the loci of participation in public sector decision-making, emphasis is placed on the creation of representative structures that mimic adult participation (Thomas 2007) within which only a few (‘elite’) individuals get to participate. This is not conducive to building a participative democracy based on the active involvement of all people as stakeholders in society.

This orientation of children and young people’s participation creates a context which is skewed towards adult corporate society rather than lifeworlds of children in communities. But this is a particular Western world phenomenon. The conclusion to the edited text Handbook of Children and Young People’s Participation by Percy-Smith and Thomas (2010) highlighted the extent to which participation across the world in non-Western contexts is understood more in terms of young people’s contributions to community rather than as a formalised public sector decision-making process. This more community-focused orientation towards children’s participation appears in turn to be based on more positive social constructions of childhood than exist for example in the UK. Indeed there is a paradox in the UK whereby public bodies consult young people about activities that can be provided to try and engage and reduce the alienation of young people, but within a wider social context where young people are often not valued for the contribution they can make to their communities.

In these situations the way in which young people mediate—in terms of reflexively responding to—their context is characterised by strategies to manage and overcome tensions, for example, through rituals of resistance such as antisocial behaviour as they grapple to find a meaningful basis for self-expression and participation (see for example Malone 2002; Percy-Smith 1999, 2006). Young people do not accept and engage with context as a given instead exercise agency in the way they develop their response to that context.

Rather than relying on service provision to address problems concerning young people in neighbourhoods, learning from non-UK contexts suggests that these problems might be better dealt with by looking at the dynamics of young people’s participation and relations within community contexts. The argument here is not that there should be no provision for young people and no role for public sector services; simply that there needs to be a swing towards understanding participation more widely in the context of young people’s everyday lives. A number of writers have hence challenged the prevailing neo-liberal, managerialist discourse of participation in public sector decision-making, arguing instead for the need to make participation relevant in the everyday community contexts of young people’s lives (Clark and Percy-Smith 2006; Cockburn 2005; Fielding 2007; Percy-Smith 2010a; Percy-Smith and Malone 2001). As Percy-Smith and Thomas (2010, 359) state as part of their conclusions to the Handbook of Children and Young People’s Participation:

Many decisions that shape the lives of individuals and communities are made within the course of everyday life rather than through political structures of government and governance. Social participation within everyday contexts can provide for more direct involvement and self-determination than is often possible in public decision-making settings.

In response to this instrumentalist view of participation, few writers have actively explored how the praxis of participation is informed by theories of agency, empowerment and active citizenship (see Cockburn 2005; Invernizzi 2008; Jans 2004; Liebel 2008; Theis 2010, for exceptions). More specifically, in light of an emerging acknowledgement of the ‘relational turn’ in the children’s participation literature (Fitzgerald et al. 2010; Mannion 2010) there is a need to rethink children’s participation in the context of everyday relationships and interactions as children and young people activate their own sense of agency in mediating between the multiple and complex social and environmental variables that shape their lives; and in turn, how adults seek to facilitate and mediate children’s participation.

This chapter therefore seeks to make a contribution to this task by taking the focus on children’s participation out of the public decision-making forum and into the everyday context of children’s lives to explore how ideas of mediation and social learning might contribute to our understanding of children’s participation as agency in context. The chapter begins with an exploration of the significance of ‘context’ in contributing to how we might understand the way in which children reflexively participate as active citizens and the varying socio-contextual influences on this. The main section of the chapter then draws on some key ideas concerning mediation and social learning to provide some operational concepts for understanding children’s reflexive engagement in relation to the contexts in which they find themselves. With these concepts in mind the chapter then finishes by considering the importance of how ‘spaces’ for participation are constructed and how the creation of different opportunity spaces can alter the way in which young people’s participation can be mediated and facilitated as joint ventures.

PARTICIPATION IN CONTEXT

In their thesis on learning as a situated social activity, Lave and Wenger (1991) argue that agency, activity and world are mutually constitutive. More recently Sotkasiira, Haikkola and Horelli (2010) articulate a Learner Network approach to ‘effective’ participation at the interface between social interaction and political activity which gives rise to spaces for the ‘self-governance’ of young people’s own plans and activities. Such a conceptualisation of participation is based on the assumption that “the intensely personal and broadly political are intimately entwined” (Batsleer 2010, 194). Elsewhere Silbereisen, Eyferth and Rudinger (1986) have followed a similar vein by evolving a theory of youth development as action in context in which they underline the agency of young people in their own development in different contexts. Bronfenbrenner (1979) similarly conceptualises an ecology of human development which a number of authors have applied to understanding children’s geographies—the way in which they make sense of and engage with the environment (see for example Matthews 1992; Percy-Smith 1999).¹ In essence, Bronfenbrenner’s thesis outlined a series of four socio-ecological or contextual levels which shape (inhibit or support) human development. Hence according to Bronfenbrenner, children’s lives are shaped by a multiple array of different interactions, decisions and actions at the micro level (family), meso level (community),² exo-system (social structures and government bodies) and macro level systems (such as the global economy), giving rise to an ecology of context for children’s lives, development and (in the context of this chapter) participation.

A further key conclusion from the recent text A Handbook of Children and Young People’s Participation (Percy-Smith and Thomas 2010) was that children and young people’s participation cannot be understood in isolation from the social, cultural and political contexts in which it occurs. In their commentary in the Handbook, Liebel and Saadi (2010, 150) note that “one cannot simply start with the English term ‘participation’ and look for semantic equivalents in other languages. Instead we would favour looking at the practices of young people, and try to understand them in their respective social and cultural settings”. Social, cultural and political variables include: dominant social constructions of childhood and attitudes to children’s rights; strong religious codes or social divisions (such as the caste system); war, conflict and instability; ways of life and material wellbeing.

Contexts are not just fixed variables or locations for action but themselves are imbued with values, shaped, regulated and reinforced by formal (decision-makers, planners, police etc.) and informal groups (community groups) in society, and continually re-interpreted and re-shaped as groups engage with their contexts. Contexts in turn can hence influence and shape the nature of individual agency and activity. Patterns of participation are structured by cultural values and practices that model social relationships and socialise children into particular ways of being, defining roles, expectations and opportunities for participation. Context therefore provides the ‘site’ of participation as well as the means with which to participate through acquisition of social and cultural capital. It is through this process that young people’s participation as citizens, and in turn their ability to participate by acquiring the skills and capacity to mediate these contexts ‘effectively’, are developed. For example, Corona, Perez and Hernandez (2010) highlight how participation in Mexico is strongly linked to community identity and belonging, giving rise to a form of ‘ethnic citizenship’ involving an accepted duty to community, embedded in local culture. Perspectives and expectations of children’s status and behaviour can regulate relations in the community, for example through subservience to adult elders (Twum-Danso 2010).

Bourdieu’s ideas of habitus and field are instructive here. Bourdieu (1993) argues that social realities are shaped by the subtle interplay between agency and structure characterised by a field (of social practice)—a social formation with its own logic, from which habitus (embodied values and dispositions) emerges which influences social values and practices. However, agency is not always prescribed and predictable. Different individuals and groups may respond differently to the ‘possibilities’ offered by particular contexts. Indeed as Bourdieu also argues, field does not just provide a context for practice and action, but is dynamic according to the way underlying fields of power, based on different forms of capital (cultural, political, social, symbolic etc.), are reflexively challenged. This is seen, for example, by the way young British Asians reflexively engage with and mediate the different cultural heritages that shape their lives. Following Lave and Wenger’s assertion (1991) that agency, activity and world are mutually constitutive, it is therefore instructive to understand participation as an activity or process involving interaction between individual or collective agency and context. This process of dynamic interactionism is explored in the following section in terms of mediation and social learning.

MEDIATION AND SOCIAL LEARNING

Dynamic Interactionism and Affordances of Context

The relationship between children and the different ecological contexts of their lives is not fixed, but rather is fluid, determined by the dynamic interaction between individual and context. These are likely to vary for different individuals with different propensities based on skills, motivation to act, social and cultural capital etc. to engage with these contexts, but also according to how amenable these contexts are to children. In relation to children’s use of their local environment, Gibson (1979) identified the potential offered by the environment in terms of affordances of place—possibilities for children to creatively generate activity in specific places. The idea of affordances of place is essentially a reciprocal relationship between place and the response of the perceiver. Children’s geographies are hence defined by the way children dynamically and creatively exploit these affordances by reflexively engaging with and mediating place contexts.

Participation in this context involves children expressing views and preferences in the moment through action as they choose where they go, what they do and how they interact with their local environmental context. Through such e...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Introduction
• 1. Participation as Mediation and Social Learning: Empowering Children as Actors in Social Contexts
• 2. Theorizing (Adults’ Facilitation of) Children’s Participation and Citizenship
• 3. Social Mediation and School Mediation: A Process of Socialisation
• 4. Participation, Facilitation and Mediation in Educational Interactions
• 5. Participation and the Institutional Agenda in Child Counselling: Proffering as a Means of Topic Management
• 6. Language Proficiency and Participation in Multi-Party Interactions and Activities
• 7. Conflict and Mediation in International Groups of Children
• 8. Children’s Thoughts on Life Experiences: Growing Up and Political Socialisation in Contexts of Education, Society and Resistance
• 9. Young Volunteers’ Perspectives on Their Interactions with Adults in Position to Facilitate Their Participation
• 10. Participation, Learning and Intercultural Experience
• 11. Goals and Outcomes of Experiential Learning in International Camps: Perceptions of Participants
• 12. International Education and Global Citizenship
• Contributors
• Index