"What's a Student Council?" - Initial Findings in Student-led Negotiated Curriculum for Democratic Education

"What's a Student Council?" - Initial Findings in Student-led Negotiated Curriculum for Democratic Education through NEEDS: Negotiating the Essentials for Education in Democratic Societies.

Keywords: Negotiated Integrated Curriculum, Democratic Education, Student Agency, Student Voice, Global Citizenship Education

Abstract:

UNESCO warn that democracy is backsliding, calling for educational reform to reinvigorate democracies and strengthen student voice (UNESCO, 2022). These concerns are reflected in the Irish context however, no framework translating this theory into practice exists (UNESCO, 2022). This framework is developed by NEEDS.

Negotiated Integrated Curriculum(NIC) enables personal/social integration by developing curriculum around students’ personal/global concerns (Fitzpatrick, 2016), creating a context-sensitive framework that empowers students as curriculum co-constructors and substantiates student voice. NEEDS adopts a social constructivist methodology through dual methodological approaches to engage in an empirical, evidence-based study of the affordances of NIC for Global Citizenship Education(GCE) in 4 post-primary schools. A socio-ecological approach (Taguma and Barrera, 2019) establishes conditions for sustained engagement, while a socio-cultural approach leverages 100 hours of unhurried time within formal curriculum.

Methods include observations, artefacts, surveys and focus-groups, complemented by close-to-practice research. Toolkits tracking Voice/Participation, Self-Direction and Wellbeing will provide insight into participant Agency and beliefs. Interpretive approaches to qualitative analysis will recursively develop codes across datasets to achieve theoretical saturation, creating a series of insight-rich case studies.

Initial findings suggest Student Voice may still face tokenism within varied post-primary contexts. Preliminary analysis reveals differing understandings of agency and authentic voice between students and teachers.

This approach enables the conditions for authentic, agentic engagement and will act as a roadmap for schools to adopt the NEEDS framework for GCE through democracy, responding to UNESCO’s call. Supported by national and international organizations and funded by the Irish Research Council Government of Ireland Postgraduate Scholarship(GOIPG/2023/2919).

Presenters:

John O’Reilly (ORCID: 0000-0001-6695-9693) works in Initial Teacher Education in the University of Limerick, Ireland. His research interests are in science education, curriculum negotiation and integration to support education through democracy. He has substantial experience of working with policy makers, management bodies and schools to create the socio-ecological conditions required for sustained educational change. He is currently leading “Negotiating the Essentials for Education in Democratic Societies” (NEEDS) which involves 4 post-primary schools in negotiating meaningful curriculum built on students’ expressed concerns about themselves and the world around them. This is based on a conceptualisation of the relationship between students’ voice, engagement and agency (O’Reilly and O’Grady, 2024) and builds on previous work on curriculum negotiation and integration (Fitzpatrick et al., 2018).

Éabha Hughes (ORCID: 0000-0002-1212-4874) is a recent graduate of Biology and Physics Teaching for Post Primary level at the University of Limerick and is an Irish Research Council Government of Ireland Postgraduate Scholar (GOIPG/2023/2919). As an early career researcher and PhD candidate at the University of Limerick School of Education, their doctoral research focuses on democratic education and student-led curriculum design through the "Negotiating the Essentials for Education in Democratic Societies" (NEEDS) project. This work explores the affordances of Negotiated, Integrated Curriculum for Global Citizenship Education through democracy, fostering meaningful learning and placing student voice at the centre of curriculum. Their doctoral research aims to provide an evidence-based framework to inform democratic curriculum design with a particular focus on addressing the risks of tokenism and barriers to authentic student decision-making in diverse educational contexts and fostering authentic student agency in education.

References:

1. Fitzpatrick, J. (2016) 'Negotiating the curriculum: An integrated approach supporting meaningful learning through learner and professional agency'

1. Taguma, M. and Barrera, M. (2019) 'OECD future of education and skills 2030: Curriculum analysis', Disponibile su: https://www.oecd.org/education/2030-project/teaching-and-learning/learning/skills/Skills_for_2030.pdf.

1. UNESCO (2022) Reimagining our futures together: A new social contract for education, UN.