Giving voice to participants in education

Abstract

Amidst continuous educational reform and top-down and bottom-up pressures on education systems, it is important not to lose sight of the main participants in education. What unites the contributions to this open issue is that they give voice to teachers, students, principals and policy makers. Without their cooperation the educational process cannot live up to expectations or comes to a grinding halt altogether. The contributions on teachers and principals demonstrate vividly how these key agents in the delivery of education struggle with increasing workloads and responsibilities, accountability processes, professional development programmes and new curriculum initiatives. They show that teachers’ and principals’ reception of and response to reforms is not uniform but depends on context, individual background and their own expectations and preferences regarding leadership and educational objectives. More broadly, they reiterate the obvious truth that the interests of principals and teachers do not always coincide with those of policy makers or parents, which often leads to the former delivering the curriculum in such a way that it departs significantly from the planned and intended one. The two papers on student voices in very different contexts point to an interesting contrast. While the study on Dutch children’s attitudes towards democracy shows these children to be very vocal in their opinions but lacking in reflection on these opinions, the study on girls in Pakistan emphasises that only through the ‘work of hearing’ can the original voices of girls not mimicking Western paradigms be accessed. The article on religious education in three conflict regions documents the difficulty of curriculum writers, experts on religious education and policy makers to overcome sectarian divisions and reform a segregated education system. Lastly, the paper on the reform of compulsory education in Turkey demonstrates that politicians also face multiple pressures in educational decision-making. They perform a careful balancing act between a global normative discourse on human rights and democracy and local demands and exigencies drawing on each to further their agendas. Bartels, Onstenk and Veugelers report on a research project in the Netherlands aiming to examine whether and how Philosophy with Children (PwC) contributes to the development of democratic skills and attitudes. The analyses show that children develop relevant reasoning skills and