This title completely sums up the provocative presentation Sarah Te One (Core Education) presented to WSLs and other interested educators last Thursday. After a brief outline of current thinking about children’s rights, Sarah focused on the word ‘agency,’ “Agency is often thought about one-dimensionally as only being about the child’s voice but it means much more than that. Agency is really about whether or not the child/learner can influence what is going on around them. Unless the child is able to exercise choice, then there is no agency.” New Zealand has been a signatory to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child for 27 years. The Convention is a balance between three potentially conflicting ideas - children as autonomous; the role of the family to raise children in their own ways; and the State’s responsibilities to ensure that children can access social services, like health and education and justice too, so that they experience a good quality life growing up to feel a sense of belonging and responsibility to society. The major points we took from Sarah’s presentation are that when we are working with children they need to be included from the beginning to the middle, to the end. Voice is not enough. Our job is to help children understand that they have rights. The Lundy model shows how we can spread students voice so they have influence: Sarah has challenged the WSLs and teachers in our Kāhui Ako to revisit the way we engage students in our inquiries. She reminded us that the way we inquire into students’ needs could be far more reciprocal. The design of an inclusive local curriculum that is a key feature of our collective work is an ideal space for us to exercise our thinking around the ideas Sarah shared.
You can view Sarah’s slideshow here and please contact us if you’d like to know more.
0 Comments
Develop and implement our own Learning Support Delivery Model |
Our Termly NewsletterS2019 Retrospective
Archives
September 2023
|