Learning Groups
Children's Rights Learning Group
Other Pages in this Section
Aims
The aim of this Learning Group is to share knowledge and expertise in relation to existing theories and practice regarding children's rights and to consider how these might best underpin approaches to the design, delivery and evaluation of diversity programmes in early childhood.
Outputs
The Learning Group is currently preparing two Working Papers that will be made available via the Reports page of this website:
- The first Paper will provide a clear and comprehensive overview of the UNCRC and use this to identify what the key dimensions of a children's rights-based approach to the design, delivery and evaluation of early childhood programs should look like.
-
The second paper will provide a critical discussion and overview of the various debates and controversies that surround the UNCRC and the notion of children's rights more broadly.
LEARNING GROUP MEETINGS
Meeting 1 - 18th February 2009, Tempe Arizona
Meeting 2 - 10th -12th March 2010, Belfast
Membership
Mercy Musomi (co-chair)
She is the Executive Director of Child Girl Network, Kenya, and has worked in civil society organizations influencing policies and legislations for the last 25 years. She has advocated for girls and women in particular issues relating to gender based violence. Specifically, her advocacy work has been around issues of child marriages and female genital mutilation. She has been successful at identifying advocacy issues that others have fear to address, for instance, initiating a campaign to mobilize and provide girls with sanitary towels to be able to remain in school throughout the month and to be able to perform as well as boys.
A powerful voice in girls' issues in Kenya, she has mobilized material and human resources, lobbied for issues that affect girls and women negatively and facilitated dialogue and empowerment of the youth with special emphasis on the girl child. She is a fully trained teacher and psychologist, with a diploma in counselling, and has four sons.
Beth Blue Swadener (co-chair)
Beth is professor and chair of Early Childhood Education and Professor of Policy Studies at Arizona State University, USA. Her research focuses on social policy, anti-oppressive/ally strategies in early childhood contexts, dual language programs, and child and family issues in sub-Saharan Africa. She has published eight books, including Reconceptualizing the Early Childhood Curriculum: Beginning the Dialogue; Children and Families "At Promise": Deconstructing the Discourse of Risk; Does the Village Still Raise the Child?: A Collaborative Study of Changing Childrearing and Early Education in Kenya, Decolonizing Research in Cross-Cultural Context and Power and Voice in Research with Children and numerous articles and book chapters. She is also active in a number of social justice and child advocacy projects including co-founding the Jirani Project (www.jiraniproject.org), supporting AIDS orphans and street children in Kenya and Local to Global Justice (www.localtoglobal.org), linking local issues to global struggles. Her current research is a collaborative, cross-national study of children's rights and voice in policies affecting them.
Natasha Blanchet-Cohen
Concordia University, Applied Human Sciences (Montreal, Canada)
Natasha Blanchet-Cohen
Janette Habashi
University of Oklahoma-Tulsa, Human Relations (USA)
Janette Habashi
Laura Lundy
Professor of Education, Queens University Belfast (Northern Ireland)
Laura Lundy
Colette Murray
Pavee Advocacy Centre (Ireland)
Colette Murray
Bekisizwe Ndimande
University of Illinois, Curriculum & Instruction and African Studies (USA)
Bekisizwe Ndimande
Nkiti Phatudi
University of Pretoria, (Chair), Early Childhood Education (South Africa)
Nkiti Phatudi
Valerie Polakow
Eastern Michigan University, Early Childhood Education and Educational Psychology (USA)
Valerie Polakow
Kylie Smith
University of Melbourne, Centre for Equity and Innovation in Early Childhood (Australia)