Pupil Participation as Perceived by Teachers. Case study of a school with many years of experience

Abstract

Czech curricular documents impose on basic (primary) schools the requirement that they ensure pupil participation. According to studies, participation has a positive eff ect, but only when it is realised eff ectively. If it is introduced merely formally and pupils have no real influence on the everyday life of the school, it can have a negative impact. Teachers and their ability to guide pupils to active participation play the key role in ensuring that participation is realised effectively.
According to research studies, however, the development of participation may be associated with teachers’ fears about loss of authority. Th e goal of this study is therefore to explore how teacher may perceive participation and what they believe to be formative factors in their position. On the basis of the experiences described by the teachers the article outlines what the school management can do to make sure that teachers do not see participation as an unpleasant duty, because it this kind of perception that leads to the merely formal approach to participation. Methods: The research was carried out in the form of the case study of a school that has experience with participation. In-depth interviews were conducted with ten teachers and documents were studied. Results: The predominant attitude among the teachers is positive: they value the infl uence that participation has on children. Despite this, they sometimes complain about pupils’ activities, and there are two main reasons for complaint. First, these activities sometimes disrupt teachers’ work, and second, some teachers had had some unpleasant experiences with participation. Conclusions: Mutual
respect between teachers and the school director helps in tackling these discordances. The fi nding of agreement on the goals of education also emerged as important. What is crucial, however, is to provide teachers with enough information on what they can expect from pupils and how they can encourage their activity in such a way that they feel comfortable in situations where the pupils are active, and do not put pupils off such activities.

Keywords: pupil participation, education for citizenship, civic education, democracy in the school, teachers’ attitudes to pupil participation, school reform, innovation in education