Children’s participation – challenges for research and practice

I’m very grateful to Sheila Greene for inviting me here, and for those generous words of welcome. I was last in Dublin in 1978, so it’s certainly high time I returned. When I was last here, Jim Callaghan was the British Prime Minister, Jack Lynch was the Taoiseach, and personal computers were the next big thing. The following year was the International Year of the Child, in which Poland proposed, and the United Nations agreed, to begin the process of negotiation and drafting from which ten years later the Convention on the Rights of the Child would emerge. Since those years, and in large part because of that Convention, there have been many changes affecting children’s place in society and how it is viewed. What I would like to do today is to reflect on some of that experience, with particular reference to ideas about children and young people’s participation. In doing so I’ll be drawing on some of my own research and writing, including work from some years ago as well as more recent material, and also of course on the work of others. The talk is in five parts, so you’ll know when we’re getting near the end.