Situated inequality in education and children’s participation in social communities: a task for professionals in leisure time institutions?

Children live their everyday life together in and across different contexts such as families, schools and leisure time institutions. In our recent research, we have explored how unequal conditions for participation in educational institutions are related to children’s different possibilities of participation in children’s communities as well as to collaborative and conflictual processes among different participants (Different professionals, parents and children) across children’s different life contexts.
In both research and professional practice, inequality is often understood as more or less causal processes related to social inheritance and intergenerational transmission of social and economic family background. However, statistical and qualitative studies point out, that these relations are neither automatic, causal nor predictable. To understand processes of inequality in educational institutions, we need to analyse them as related to children’s access to social resources within the institutions, which again relates to concrete situated collaboration and conflicts among different participants here – children, teachers, parents, pedagogues and psychologists.

On the basis of an ongoing research-project about “Leisure time pedagogy and situated inequality”, we present the theoretical framework for understanding inequality as related to concrete social dynamics in the everyday life among both children and different professionals. By empirical examples, we illustrate how inequality is related to social situations and nexuses across children’s compound everyday life contexts – as a basis for understanding how different professional’s perspectives and interventions play together and form conditions for the children’s conduct of everyday life. The acknowledgement of the signification of children’s access to collaboration with other children points to the importance of involving professionals from leisure time institutions and their pedagogic knowledge and activities in the understanding as well as the exceeding of inequality in children’s social life.
Hence, in this presentation we will emphasize the possibilities of professionals in leisure time institutions, in relation to supporting the children’s possibilities of participation. We focus on their specific professional knowledge as different from, though related to the professional knowledge of teachers (Hence our insistence on the concept of leisure time institutions rather than after school centres). This is a central point, since it includes the professional history of supporting children’s leisure time, their communities, collaboration, common activities, personal engagements, influence, and agency. In this way professionals in leisure time institutions seem to have specific possibilities for working with relevant possibilities of participation for all children.
In the research project, forming the basis of the presentation, we conduct participatory observations in the life contexts of the children and the professionals’ contexts of the pedagogues - as for instance meetings and interdisciplinary collaboration. Furthermore, we conduct interviews with the involved and close research collaboration with the professionals. The theoretical basis for this exploration is a practice and subject oriented critical psychology with a focus on children’s development of conduct of everyday life.