This article analyses the experience of school in terms of children's citizenship, exploring the level of participation experienced by a sample of Irish primary school children over decisions related to the control of their time, space and interaction in school. Locating such experience within the context of the structuration of adult-child relations, education for and into citizenship, it is argued, must take account of the dynamics of power and control between adults and children, teachers and pupils and the impact on children's construction of themselves as citizens with a voice to be both heard and expressed in school.
Given the changing patterns of immigration in the Republic of Ireland in the past 10 years, this article considers how factors related to ethnic and gender identity mediate children's interaction with one another in a newly multi-ethnic Irish primary school. Central to the analysis is the exercise of power between children and how the experience of inclusion and exclusion in peer relations is underpinned by concepts of sameness/difference that draw upon wider discourses of ethnic and gender identity. Recommendations in relation to classroom and school practice are made with reference to the need for teachers to take account of the complexity of children's social worlds and the dynamics of power and control that operate within it.
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