Investigating children’s participation in a Froebelian context

This study aims to investigate how children’s participation is lived and negotiated by children and practitioners in one Froebelian nursery context. Children's participation is broadly defined as the involvement of children in all matters affecting their lives(Tisdall 2016).Moreover, it is one of the children's rights enshrined in the UNCRC(1989).There is an emerging field of children's participation and the literature highlights the necessity of contemporary studies investigating meaningful participation in children's everyday lives in early years(Blaisdell 2016). Froebelian approach emphasises the integrity of childhood in its own right and children's participation prevails as an important element of this pedagogy(Tovey 2017).As a prominent discourse in the early years, Froebel coined the phrase of child-centredness that emphasises the curriculum is driven and in harmony with children's participation(Bruce 2012;Bruce et al.2019).Therefore,investigating children's participation within a Froebelian context would reflect more of the contemporary practices of his theory. The methodological approach of this qualitative research is ethnography involving 9 months of fieldwork via a)semi-structured interviews with practitioners and b) participant and direct/non-participant observation with children and practitioners. In addition to the written informed consent from practitioners and parents'/caregivers', I obtain children's informed consents verbally by using picture-book. As the research is still in progress, the findings are constantly evolving. As an initial discussion,within daily life in a setting adopting Froebelian philosophy, children's participation is prevailing in terms of time and space;and child-adult and child-child relationships.Further findings are expected to provide insights on reconceptualisation of Froebelian pedagogy in terms of children's participation that prevails the practices in theory. 

Keywords: children's participation, mundane participation, Froebelian approach, child-centred/democratic pedagogy, children's rights