Since the advent of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), concerns have been raised regarding tokenistic engagement with children's participation rights as well as ethical considerations that must be addressed in research with children. This article explores how one particular ethical dilemma regarding representation…

Aotearoa New Zealand ratified the 1989 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) in 1993, which means its principles and rights are obligatory, not optional. So, UNCRC has important implications for teachers, leaders, and boards of trustees in schools. UNCRC has 54 articles. A good starting point for teachers is the articles…

Children's participation is valued in early childhood education but how this is achieved in pedagogy is less obvious. The methodology of conversation analysis is used in this paper to show how specific interactional practices afford opportunities for children to initiate, explore, and assert their own perspectives in everyday activities. The…

Including all children is something many education settings aspire to, yet the outcome of children realising their right to an inclusive education remains elusive for far too many. In this article we present the narrative of an inclusive early childhood education setting. The first author undertook an ethnographic study of the experiences of an…

This paper presents a framework for what we consider are essential elements for realising the linguistic rights of Indigenous children in the twenty-first century. The global impacts of colonisation on various Indigenous communities have resulted in loss of cultural practices, knowledge and loss of languages. This framework points to ways forward…

As a non-participant observer of a Teaching and Learning Research Initiative (TLRI) on children's storytelling, I explored children's understanding of research involving them, including their rights to consent, assent and dissent to participate. In this case study of Timmy's participation in research, I show how Timmy's researcher sought and…

Every year, worldwide, disasters affect approximately seven million children with disabilities, highlighting their potential vulnerability. Although there is a growing move internationally to promote the rights of children with disabilities, they still receive little attention from disaster risk reduction (DRR) researchers and policy makers. They…

The social service sector in New Zealand is undergoing significant change with the Minister responsible for introducing a new Ministry for Vulnerable Children (now Ministry for Children) signalling a commitment to practice being child-centred and trauma-informed in the new era. There is no shared understanding of these terms or what they will mean…

This article reviews the draft "Strategic Plan for Early Learning 2019-2029" against the New Zealand Government's obligations to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. Using discourse analysis, the authors identify explicit and implicit references to protection, provision, and participation rights within the document.…

In 2015/16 Action for Children and Youth Aotearoa (ACYA) prepared, produced and presented New Zealand's fifth civil society, non-government organisations' Alternative Report to the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child on how well Aotearoa New Zealand complies with its obligations under the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. This article…

New Zealand has faced an unprecedented series of disaster events in recent years. The Canterbury earthquakes provided an opportunity to document the role that schools played in supporting their communities to respond to and recover from such events. It is important that we capture what we have learnt from these experiences to help other schools in…

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNICEF Office of Research-Innocenti, 2001) highlights our role as educators in the "preparation of the child for responsible life in a free society, in the spirit of understanding, peace, tolerance, equality of sexes, and friendship among all peoples" (Article 29(1)(d)). "Te…

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child provides a significant platform to include children's views on issues that affect their lives, yet, in many contexts, particularly in educational practice, children's perspectives continue to be irregularly sought and are rarely acted upon. By providing children's perspectives on what they…

In a recent keynote speech Paul Standish noted "there is agreement in judgments. But how the response to those judgments is realised is always cultural" (paper presented to PESA Conference, Taiwan, 2012, p. 2). Making judgments about what constitutes "crisis" for children is not necessarily agreed universally, though clearly…

The Feuerstein approach to the teaching of thinking is highly regarded internationally as an effective programme for vulnerable learners and learners with special educational needs. This paper describes this approach. The need for this approach in New Zealand is discussed, including children's rights to it, and the New Zealand National Curriculum…