Working with Children and Young People for Social Justice

Despite growing global recognition of children and young people’s participation rights and agency, significant challenges remain in achieving social justice with children and young people across diverse contexts. Practitioners, researchers, and policymakers must navigate competing understandings of rights, citizenship, voice, activism, and participation, while recognising how dominant approaches can be shaped by Eurocentric assumptions that may not reflect the realities of different cultural, social and political settings.

To begin to address these challenges, this course:

•        Introduces practitioners to several social justice approaches to working with children and young people that are practised in both majority and minority world countries.

•        Critically explores how Eurocentric assumptions and practices can underpin these approaches.

•        Explores how citizenship, democracy, rights, agency, voice and activism are understood and practised differently in majority and minority world contexts.

•        Challenges and supports practitioners to decolonise their own praxis and propose more contextualised social justice approaches for working with children and young people in different settings across the globe.

The course will be delivered online over eleven weeks.

The course consists of:

•        Pre-recorded lectures which are posted online each week so that practitioners in different contexts and time zones can engage at times that are most convenient to them.

•        Optional live tutorials

•        Weekly reading tasks

•        Asynchronous discussion forums and digital activities

The course is designed with the principle of asynchronous participation. Optional live tutorials are recorded for anyone unable to attend, but do provide a great opportunity to connect with tutors and other students.

The course is delivered through a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) called Learn Ultra. Students will access recorded lectures and other online materials. They will also engage in online discussion forum tasks.

In joining this course, you can expect to become part of a vibrant and global online community of practice made up of both professional learning participants and masters students. This community offers structured yet flexible academic support to engage in and critically reflect on your work with children and young people to achieve social justice goals.

This course will be of interest if you:

•         work with children and young people (for example, as an early years practitioner, youth worker, teacher, community practitioner or researcher)

•         are interested in advancing children and young people’s participation rights and political agency

•         wish to understand how citizenship, rights, agency, voice, and activism are understood across different cultural and political contexts

•         want to co-design services and shape policy with children and young people

•         would like to embed decolonial approaches to working with children and young people in your own practice and organisation

This course is delivered at masters level (SCQF level 11) and is open to professional learning participants as well as matriculated masters students.

Please note: Professional learning participants do not receive credits for this course. If they successfully complete the required assessment (see below), they will receive a certificate of completion which can be used to evidence professional learning.

To enrol in the course, you must:

•        have voluntary or professional experience of working with children and young people.

•        be willing to engage with academic concepts, texts and research to reflect critically on real-world practice issues, problems and debates.

•        have access to a device for online learning (i.e. mobile phone, laptop etc), be comfortable learning online and willing to develop your digital literacy and skills using the guides and support available through the University.

NB Students whose first language is not English must demonstrate some evidence of their English language competence.