Interview with Roger Hart
Roger Hart is Professor at Children’s
Environments Research Group, City University of New
York, USA. He is being interviewed by Per Egil Mjaavatn
who is Senior researcher at Institute of Education,
Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU).
They discuss citizenship building with children
and youth:
In many countries both NGO’s and government
agencies are developing a wide range of programs to
increase the degree of children’s agency, social
cooperation and decision-making, as part of a new conception
of the rights of children as citizens. But the arrangements
of the daily settings where children spend most of their
time commonly remain the same. The spatial arrangement
of the physical environment reflects and reproduces
traditional patterns of social relations between children
and their peers and between children and adults. This
presentation presents theory on this theme in relation
to school and early child care design in a sample of
nations from both the North and the South. It concludes
with a discussion of the potentials of the collective
transformation of space for the building of democratic
communities.
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