[Sandra Yepez]

In the reading material of this lesson, we have proposed some key questions to consider before involving children. We invite you to join the forum and share with the community your reflections on these questions, as well as your experiences and recommendation.

1. How do you support children’s active and meaningful participation in your group or community? What challenges have you faced in this process?
2. What aspects of your collaborative work with children would you like to enhance, and what do you hope to achieve?
3. What difficulties have you faced -or do you think you could face- while trying to involve children in your work?
4. From your experience, why do you think children’s participation is so important?

[xavier]

1. I’ve supported children’s active and meaningful participation in my community by first recalibrating my listening to active, engaged listening. This is step one of proper child participation in any project. The main challenge I’ve encountered so far was talking to other adult leaders into changing their ways of thinking, either when it comes to adult-child dynamics, children as decision makers etc.
2. I would like to enhance the long-term sustainability of our collaborative work with children, often times children participate in one off projects due to time constraints, I wish to change that.
3. Simply shifting peoples’ mindsets from tokenism (which is the norm, unfortunately), do meaningful participation
4. It is important due to the simple fact that children are entitled to more than a seat at the table, we owe it to children to show them that their VOICE matters, and isn’t taken for granted.

[Ogunsakin]

1.Supporting children participation is vital to their and acquisition of knowledge. Giving children the ability to engage in various classroom and outside classroom will improve their responsibility. Creating different groups in the classroom for class activities through role play, enhance their engagement to improve their skills. Meanwhile the challenge I faced is tissue of correcting their way of handling issue when they face challenge in their activities. Understand that children will always be children, there is need to know that they are children.
2. I will work on the long lasting sustainability of collective efforts to achieve a better relationship.
3. I think I will face the issue of their childish attitude. But understanding and acceptance of who they are is important.
4. Children participation is vital for development both for physical and cognitive growth. I believed involving the children will help in promoting their learning process.

[Forpeace]

1. I support children’s active and meaningful participation in my community first by asking them their opinions about usual things and try to help them to justify their answer from personal point of view. What I want is that they learn to have ones own opinion and to reflect on the justification. Through this practice they learn to build ones opinion and to hear and respect different opinions.
2. I would like to enhance following aspects of my collaborative work with children:
– Every issue has multiple accesses and only in joint collaboration can we have a better understanding of the issue
– no one owns the truth so every participation has to be respected and taken into consideration
– Our world becomes a global village and we have a shared future that´s why we need to have a look over the edge.
3. The main difficulty I faced while trying to involve children in my work is that the structures of the community is traditionally based on adults or in most cases old people and they don´t want to give responsibilities to young people and they don´t have the need to change things which they no longer worked because of changes. They live still in the past and try to revive the “good past”
4. From my own experience children’s participation is vital because they represent the future and if we engage them now they would be more responsible in the future. Children are not or less afflicted. They have more acceptance for diversity, for critic… they are more willing to learn and to try. Last but not least they are very creative and have genuine ideas to solve problems

[Gabriela]

From personal experience I have found that children enjoy engaging in activities that enhance their knowledge and skills. it is not only their right, but it is our duty, as adults, to create safe environments for them to express their opinions and to be taken into account.
I carried out volunteer activities in which the students were active members.

[Ogunsakin]

1. Through engagment in task in classroom, and also engaging i n role play that will help the children well.
2. I will like to improve in my relationship with them, because it is important to build a better relationship.
3, Due to nature of children, I found it difficult in controlling them and organizing.

[badrumusoke]

1.To support children participation is very important due to the fact that it gives a child to engage in the learning process.

2. I like to emphasise the collaboration work with my children

3. You have to change the mindset of the people particularly teachers to shift from tokenism to meaningful participation.

4. It is more than important due to the fact that the children also they’ve something in their brains, their brains are not empty.

[Effort Brave Mutauto]

1. I support children’s active and meaningful participation in my community by making them implementers of the tasks and hearing from them, on how best can we do things before i put my input on the project. I want them to be empowered and be problem solvers through teamworking. I faced challenges of limited time and resources
2. I would like to enhance a problem solving character and an atmosphere of possibilities among their thoughts
3. Shifting the mindset of other colleagues who interact with the children in some areas or learning areas from tokenism to meaningful participation
4. From my own experience children’s participation is vital because they represent the future and if we engage them now they would be more responsible in the future. Also they have a better way of understanding the environment among themselves, hence, their views and contributions should be respected

[operarioribeiro]

1. Analyzing the children’s needs, capacities, and desire in the project and in participating in it. Creating a safe space for their progressive participation, according to their capacities. To which social, educational, and psychological problems may appear.
2. I want to enhance my capacities in the level of seeming involvement the most so that I may understand the underlying bases of children pedagogy.
3. Due to complexity of interfaith literacy, I’m afraid children might find it boring. And due to the hegemonic violence culture they have, that they also get defensive against peace culture education.
4. Children are vital to the interfaith peace culture movement because they are the ones that will have to decide for our planetary future sustainable development.

[Gabogabo]

I’m taking this training as an early career teacher (USA-based) who is looking to build skills toward providing childcare for organizing spaces. My vision is for the childcare to not just be babysitting (not to trivialize that labor), but to work towards children participating in organizing spaces. I have supported children’s participation in my classroom by making my lessons actively responsive to their voice and feedback, but mostly at the “Consulted and Informed” level or below :(. Trying to create a new space where the goal is level 6 or above on Hart’s Ladder is a new challenge which will involve building trust with parents & organizers, and advocating for why kids lib should be (or really, already is) a shared value. Difficulties I faced in the classroom were that…schools are places where children are conditioned into seeing themselves as non-participants who don’t have agency over how their time is spent, and my couple hours per week with them generally weren’t enough to bridge that gap. The kids I worked with responded instantly to my efforts to show them that I was listening and would make changes based on their input…but to transform that opening into real participation, they would also have to feel that putting effort into sharing ideas (i.e., investing energy, thought, time, heart into planning how their time in school was spent) was going to be worthwhile. When it never has been worthwhile before, and when school itself is sort of a place they’re coerced into being…that’s a big hill to climb. Occasionally it was possible to do a project that was child-initiated but adult-led (in that one or more of my students volunteered the idea when asked, and I made it happen during a subsequent class), but even in those cases, I wouldn’t say that I actually managed to inform them. Having a conversation about what materials were available / in-budget, what kind of scope was feasible, what would fit curricular goals and what wouldn’t was (for me at least) impossible within the tight class schedule — but also, and maybe more importantly, I couldn’t find a way to present those issues to my students in a way that they would feel interested in taking ownership over and thinking through. I don’t mean to imply that participation models aren’t workable in schools! Those challenges are what’s motivating me to seek out resources like this course, to find alternative interventions and ways of doing this work successfully. Everyone’s participation is important, and intergenerational communication makes so much possible that simply wouldn’t be otherwise.

[Mary Nyabuay Majok]

I have supported children’s active participation in my community by giving them chance to identify the problems they are facing as individuals and that of their friends hence giving them chance to find a solution to problems they have identify. In this process some children cannot be able to participate fully since they are afraid that their peers will make fun of them
I would like to enhance long-term collaboration with the children hence I will be able to help them make their own decision hence they will independent leaders in the future
The difficulties I will be facing when working with children are no other than old stereotypes where decision made by children are look down upon many people will nolonger accept children’s ideas in the community since they think that children are not smart like adults
According to my own experience children’s participation is very important since they are able to exercise their full rights of expression and make better decisions in matters concerning them
Lastly children are the future generation the more they are given chance to participate in the early era, the more they are able to build their confidence hence will be able to make good and independent decisions in future

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