Authors: Yamuna Basnet, Binayak Krishna Thapa
Participation among children in their educational settings has been a topic of interest for researchers and practitioners working with children alike, for many decades. The word ‘participation’ has various meanings and connotations when examined and analyzed in terms of educational research on children. The spectrum of its meaning starts from mere student enrollment in schools, to the ability of a child to freely make decisions and exercise her/his agency to engage in daily activities in school settings. The importance of examining and understanding participation among girls and boys in their everyday school environment pertains to assessing their level of willingness and ability to communicate, make decisions for themselves, engage in school activities one values, express one’s concerns and interests, and many more attributes that a student can potentially develop in and through educational settings. Hence, participation, or social participation among children, becomes one of the key educational outcomes to assess children’s well-being.
This blog attempts to offer an account of how children, both girls and boys, seem to participate in their daily school routines. The account offered here has a contextual setting of hill community schools of Bhojpur Municipality, Bhojpur District, Nepal, and the evidence presented here stems from 13 community schools of each ward of the Municipality. The methods employed to collect data were 26 workshops conducted among girls and boys separately, with two workshops for each school, with 234 students from grades 1-10 engaged in the process. The case provided here is also based on field observations made during the regular visits to each school; this includes the morning assembly activities in schools, break times, and short communications/interactions with children. Lastly, the analysis is drawn from data collected through a survey on children’s well-being diagnosis (also called a GESI diagnosis).
Most schools in Bhojpur have some version of the same weekly schedule: a sports period, a cleanliness drive, a singing or dance event before a holiday or for a special event, a quiz or drawing competition announced by the teachers themselves. On paper, every child in the room is supposed to have access to all of it, but whether a child actually steps forward, picks up the volleyball, raises a hand to join the quiz team, or walks up to sing on the stage is a different question. When we asked students from 13 community schools about their thoughts on participation in a series of focus group discussions and a subsequent baseline survey, almost everyone described the abundance of opportunities, but fewer described actually consistently taking them.
For boys, participation was talked about mostly through extracurricular activities and community sports programs, but also through singing, dancing,drawing, handwriting competitions, quizzes, and cleanliness drives organised in their community. The list we noted down was long and varied, which included things like playing volleyball, taking part in every sport or game offered, joining ECA programs, showing up for events, making a presence at a program, and attending community activities. A few boys also described why the things they listed mattered to them. Extracurricular involvement, in their words, was a chance to explore something outside the regular curriculum, to build a skill, to show a talent, and to grow more confident. Sports specifically came up as a good for the mind and for physical health, and also something that builds discipline and teamwork along the way. Similarly, community involvement was described as a way of strengthening relationships and contributing something back. One boy put it in simple words: playing is good for health. Another said everyone should get the chance to showcase their talent.
Girls’ answers covered similar ground like sports, dance, singing, debate, quizzes, running, and volleyball, but their answers tended to say more about what participation does for a person, and not just what it involves. Several linked it directly to confidence; participating in class presentations increases confidence, and that it reduces fear of public speaking and promotes better performance in practical work. A number of comments returned to a specific point worth mulling over, that participation is more important than winning, and that teachers encouraging participation in school sports is essential. They also connected participation to learning and growth more broadly: joining sports and school programs builds cooperation, trying a range of activities beyond just sports opens up different kinds of learning, and participating in social activities is a way to learn about different things and get inspired by that. Another girl added that everyone should be able to join in these activities. Even though it’s a small phrase, it subtly assumes that not everyone currently does.
The baseline data also backs up what came out in these conversations. Overall, the picture is a positive one, where children generally feel that they have chances to participate in different parts of school life like talking with their friends, joining extracurricular activities, playing sports, speaking up in class, and they also feel that this is something they can choose rather than something decided entirely for them. But it is important to note here that there’s a gap between having the opportunity and actually using it, and it shows up clearly in two specific places: conversations with friends, and participation in the classroom. Children generally feel able to participate, but how often they actually do so is a little less consistent. Classroom participation is a good example of why this distinction matters. Raising a hand, answering a question, and questioning a teacher outright are not the same act, even though they might look similar from the back of the room. Each one asks something different of a child like the different levels of confidence, a different degree of initiative, a different comfort with speaking up in a space where the teachers hold the highest authority.
A similar pattern also shows up outside the classroom, particularly in sports, where a fairly clear gender difference is evident. Boys tend to report stronger participation across the board by having the opportunity, actually taking part, and choosing to do it. On the other hand, girls show relatively stronger affinity in some forms of classroom participation like answering questions. While neither pattern says one group has more freedom than the other in any simple sense, it instead suggests that the same opportunity doesn’t appear the same way for everyone. Many factors like peer relationships, classroom habits, gender expectations, a child’s own confidence, and their relationship with a teacher all shape whether an open door gets walked through.
We should understand here that this gap between being present and being heard isn’t unique to a classroom or a courtyard. A 2008 literature review on children’s participation in decisions about their own care, prepared for South Australia’s Guardian for Children and Young people, traces almost the exact same pattern in a different setting, of children in state care attending formal meetings about their own lives. The review pulls together decades of research, and one finding stands out because it replicates the answers from Bhojpur classrooms so closely. Being invited to a meeting, or being physically present in the room, turned out to say very little about whether a child was actually heard. In one study cited in the review, nearly half of the social workers surveyed believed the children in their care had spoken freely during meetings but only about a third of the children themselves felt that they had. Adults and children, in other words, were watching the same room and coming away with different impressions of what had actually happened in it.
Researchers in this field have tried to name the different rungs of that gap. Some describe participation as a ladder, running from simply being informed, to being consulted, to actually sharing in a decision, to a child initiating something themselves. Others prefer a simpler question: not how much power a child holds, but whether their views are listened to, taken seriously, and acted on. Either way, the point lines up with what Bhojpur’s classroom data already suggested, that “raising a hand,” “answering a question,” and “questioning a teacher” aren’t just three versions of the same thing done with varying confidence; they genuinely do sit at different points on that ladder. The review also points to something that fits perfectly with what teachers already seem to matter for in Bhojpur’s own findings, i.e, trust. Across the studies it draws on, a dependable relationship with a trusted adult comes up repeatedly as the single strongest factor in whether a child actually participates, more than any policy or formal invitation ever manages on its own. Where that relationship is missing through a change of teacher, or simply not enough time spent together, children were more likely to hold back, not because they had nothing to say, but because they had less reason to trust that saying it would matter.
And there’s also a smaller detail that clearly complements what one girl in Bhojpur said about winning. Researchers asked children in care what they actually wanted out of participating in decisions about their lives. “To have my say” came out near the top of the list, and “To get what I want” came out near the bottom. When social workers were asked to guess the same thing on children’s behalf, they guessed the opposite, assuming children mainly wanted outcomes, when what many of them wanted most was simply to be part of the conversation. It’s the same idea a Bhojpur student put more simply, which is that participation matters more than winning. One other idea from the survey data that is worth pointing out, because it explains a lot of the gap described above, is that capability and agency are not the same as belief or desire. A child can value something completely, want it without hesitation, and still not have the practical freedom to go after it. Some capability scholars call this practical reason, or the ability to connect what you want with what you actually do, and to reflect on your own choices. That ability depends on more than motivation; it depends on the support around a child like the school, teachers, family, and a general sense that a particular path is genuinely open to them.
In Bhojpur, children generally report feeling able to concentrate, attend school, move through grades, and keep up decent study habits, with no large or consistent gap between boys and girls in education overall. But the experience isn’t identical either, and neither group has more freedom than the other in any simple sense. Girls show somewhat stronger patterns around educational success and engagement with school whereas boys show somewhat stronger patterns of agency specifically within reading, writing, and learning. When it comes to participation, specifically classroom activities and outdoor games, children tend to describe it less as something they actively chose, and more as something that simply happens, or doesn’t happen, around them. For any child, that difference between presence and participation matters more than it might first appear, because what shapes a child’s well-being isn’t only whether an activity took place, but also whether she had a real, valued chance to choose it for herself. And something to be noted here is that the numbers we noted around outdoor games could be shaped by any number of things like physical access, confidence, how peer groups form, unspoken ideas about which spaces are “for” boys or girls, or simply what a particular school happens to offer.
For researchers like us, who seek to understand the status of equality in a school setting, judging the outcomes based on how it looks once averaged out will not be a fair analysis. It has to be looked at through participation, choice, and support because two children can end up in roughly the same place while having walked there along very differently free paths. One may have chosen every step while the other may have simply gone along, because that’s what was expected, or available, or easiest to them. While it both looks like participation from the outside, they’re not quite the same thing if we look inside. And as the wider research on children’s participation keeps finding, the surest way to know the difference isn’t to count who was in the room, but rather to ask afterward, whether they felt anyone was actually listening when they were speaking.
Note: This blog is an output of the project titled ‘Promoting Gender Equality and Social Inclusion in Schools: Building on What Children Value and Aspire to Do and Be,’ implemented by LIKE Lab, Kathmandu University School of Arts, with support from the Global Partnership for Education and Innovation Exchange (GPE KIX) and the International Development Research Centre (IDRC).
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed herein do not necessarily represent those of the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) or its Board of Governors.
