For the purpose of this publication, the authors shall discuss the subject of young people as citizens and, particularly, as members of a community. Their focus shall be on how young people perceive themselves as members of one (or several) community(ies), and on how communitarian interactions (at an interpersonal and/or an organizational level) are viewed, by them, as fundamental for their own development and for that of the community(ies) to which they belong. The contributions featured in this special issue invoke a broad understanding of participation and citizenship in terms of children's everyday experiences, informed by their roles as members of one (or several) family(ies), as students, as inhabitants of a certain space, etc. These different roles emerge both as products and as constructs of the different 'stages' upon which the child acts: they are contexts of individual but also collective -and eventually communitarian -action and appropriation. The concept of community as dialectics is especially relevant here, since what is sought is not consensus, but rather participation, which, in its plurality of forms, warrants the emergence of initiatives that really correspond to the individuals' demands. The 'common', rather than smothering diversity, emerges with the purpose of configuring fuller and more complex ways of experiencing citizenship and citizens' rights.
Due to its complexity, size, diversity (internal or external) and meanings, it is possible to analyse the city from various points of view, which are, ultimately, references for the construction of knowledge about the urban space, and the logic of apprehension and appropriation used by individuals and organizations in relation to the place they inhabit. The city is, increasingly, a context for isolation and exclusion, where individuals share fewer experiences, which therefore become less significant. The effective range of action each person or group has towards the city is clearly limited. This interferes with the process of producing practical and emotional meanings, since the message conveyed is that such a space is defined 'in spite of people' and not 'because of people'. In this article, the author mobilizes the productions of children between the ages of 5 and 17 in an attempt to capture their perceptions (their discourse) about urban life and education, as well as their appropriations (their projects), either past, present or future. In the process, the author also discusses focus groups as platforms for participation in the community context.
Educational processes have had to deal with the significant changes that have been occurring throughout the world, at different levels, in the last few decades. The Educating Cities movement, which has been followed by cities from all over the world -from Rwanda to Denmark,
“À Descoberta do Mundo Rural†[Discovering the Rural World] was a 15-month-long project, based on a partnership between the Institute of Educational Communities (ICE) and the Portuguese Association for Local Development (ANIMAR), both Portuguese NGOs, and financed by national and European funds. Its purpose was to identify and give visibility to formal and informal local development initiatives taking place in rural contexts across Portugal. The research team contacted and visited several places and talked directly with the initiatives’ representatives, as well as with other locally relevant social actors, such as representatives of local governments, schools, associations and charity organisations. Based on a participatory community-based research, local development was conceptualised as an educational process from a broader perspective than that of schooling. Through eight selected case studies, this paper focuses on how rural schools promote, participate in or otherwise contribute to the socio-educational development of the communities in which they are located.
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