1st Edition
Children’s Right to Silence and Non-Participation in Education Redefining Student Voice
This insightful book re-examines the concept of student voice through an exploration of children’s implicit rights to silence and non-participation. By considering what remains unspoken but is voiced through silence, this book theorises silence through the lens of power.
Responding to calls for more critical approaches to children's participation under the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, this unique exposition of silence ventures beyond traditional notions of voice as a defining term for justice and participation, and traditional understandings of silence as powerlessness. Instead, this book presents young people’s uses and understandings of silence at school as an instrument of power. Based on empirical research, the book reconceptualises children’s participation rights through silence.
Addressing an important gap in the literature on student voice and children’s participation, this book is a valuable resource for academics, researchers, and postgraduate students in the fields of children’s human rights, childhood studies, and educational philosophy.
Part I: Silence, Voice, and Power
1. Introduction to voice, silence, and power
2. Conceptualising Power in the Right to be Heard and the Right to Silence
Part II: Silence at School: Empirical Findings
3. Silence and the Panaudicon
4. Silence in Pedagogy
5. Silence and Respect in School Relationships
6. Silence as Expression
7. Silence in Youth Representation
Part III: The Right to Silence and Non-Participation
8. Silence and Non-Participation
9. Redefining Voice – a Conclusion
Biography
Amy Hanna is a Lecturer at the Institute of Education, University of Strathclyde whose research interests include childhood and children’s human rights, children’s human rights theory, and participation.
