We wanted Enabling Education Review 7 to be written only by children and young people under 25 years old.
Preparations
We circulated a call for articles which included some basic advice for teachers and other adults on how to encourage and support young people to prepare their submissions. We know from experience that adults sometimes find it difficult to give children and young people the freedom to say what they want to say. Our budget was not big enough to offer face-to-face guidance to adult facilitators, but we provided support via email when asked.
We also invited some young people to review all the articles and write editorial comments about them.
Results
We published a 68-page edition, the largest Enabling Education Review ever!
The young authors and editors came from Armenia, Ethiopia, Ghana, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, United Kingdom, Ukraine, USA, Zambia and Zanzibar.
They wrote about:
- Our views on education
- What is inclusive education?
- Inclusion of learners with disabilities
- Children as researchers
- Young advocates
- What makes a good teacher?
- What makes us included or excluded?
- Attitudes and bullying
- Education for street-connected children
- Girls’ education
- Ethnicity and nationality.
The process was not perfect, of course. Some submissions were still rather adult-guided, perhaps by a teacher who set inclusion as an essay topic and provided background information which was then repeated in all the essays. Nevertheless, every young writer said something unique and interesting about education and/or inclusion from their own personal perspective.
You can read their amazing edition of Enabling Education Review in HTML and PDF formats.
Further contributions
If you are a young person – or if you know a young person – who wants to share experiences and ideas on inclusive education, please contact us. You can send us your articles, poems, or artwork for publication on this website or in future editions of Enabling Education Review.