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Educational Review
ISSN: 0013-1911 (Print) 1465-3397 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cedr20
Childhood participation experiences in the
memory
M. Gómez, T. Morata & J. Trilla
To cite this article: M. Gómez, T. Morata & J. Trilla (2016) Childhood participation experiences in
the memory, Educational Review, 68:2, 189-206, DOI: 10.1080/00131911.2015.1067879
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00131911.2015.1067879
Published online: 29 Jul 2015.
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Childhood participation experiences in the memory
M. Gómez
a
*, T. Morata
b
and J. Trilla
a
a
Theory and History of Education Department, University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain;
b
Social Education and Social Work Department, Ramon Llull University, Barcelona, Spain
This article is based on the findings of a broader research project entitled “Child-
hood Participation and Citizenship Building”, which examined the medium-term
effects of intense experiences of participation in childhood within both the
school environment and those of leisure-time and community education. The
results presented in this article refer specifically to the memories subjects hold of
their participation in these childhood experiences. The study combined quantita-
tive (using a questionnaire) and qualitative approaches (conducting in-depth
interviews). The results obtained contribute to strengthening the idea –explicit
or implicit in all pedagogies that seek to promote child participation –that such
participation is not only a right, but that it also contributes to the quality of
educational experiences.
Keywords: child participation; leisure-time education; school; children’s
councils; memories
Introduction
If I am to be honest, the entire period of my schooling was nothing other than a constant
and wearisome boredom, accompanied year after year by an increased impatience to
escape from this treadmill. I cannot recall ever having been either “joyous”or “blissful”
during that monotonous, heartless and lifeless schooling which thoroughly spoiled the
best and freest period of our existence. (…) For us, school was compulsion, tedious
monotony and dreariness, a place where we had to assimilate the “science of the not-
worth-knowing”in exactly measured portions –scholastic or scholastically manufac-
tured material which we felt could have no relation to reality or to our personal interests.
(…) And the only truly joyful moment of happiness for which I have to thank my school
was the day I was able to shut the door behind me forever. (Zweig 2001,51–2)
In his memoir The Memory Chalet, leading European intellectual, Tony Judt, recalls
the “grim”institution he attended “six times a week (…) for nearly seven years”,
with the poignant words: “I hated school”(Judt 2010, 97). And after cataloguing the
moral, cultural and educational miseries inflicted on him by that institution, in an
almost exact mirroring of Stefan Zweig’s experiences, the British historian refers to
the day he was finally able to leave that school in the following terms: “I recall few
happier moments”(Judt 2010, 100).
Fortunately, much more favourable accounts of life at school than the recollec-
tions of Judt and Zweig can be found. And a good number do recall with evident
nostalgia the many happy moments spent at school, their authors being keen to
express their gratitude to both the institution and its teachers for the education
*Corresponding author. Email: mgomez@ub.edu
© 2015 Educational Review
Educational Review, 2016
Vol. 68, No. 2, 189–206, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00131911.2015.1067879
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received. Yet, what stands out in nineteenth and twentieth century narrative –be it
in fiction or memoirs –are the number of descriptions and judgements of a bitter,
negative nature.
1
As in this eloquent paragraph from Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) in
The Waves (1931):
“It is the first day of the summer holidays,”said Susan. “But the day is still rolled up.
I will not examine it until I step out on to the platform in the evening. I will not let
myself even smell it until I smell the cold green air off the fields. But already these are
not school fields; these are not school hedges; the men in these fields are doing real
things; they fill carts with real hay; and those are real cows, not school cows. But the
carbolic smell of corridors and the chalky smell of schoolrooms is still in my nostrils.
The glazed, shiny look of matchboard is still in my eyes. I must wait for fields and
hedges, and woods and fields, and steep railway cuttings, sprinkled with gorse bushes,
and trucks in sidings, and tunnels and suburban gardens with women hanging out
washing, and then fields again and children swinging on gates, to cover it over, to bury
it deep, this school that I have hated”. (Woolf 1931, 36)
In few yet so poetic lines, Virginia Woolf expresses some of the features of this
traditional school that she –and many others –remembered with hatred: how it iso-
lated itself from its surroundings to become a world apart, how it distorted and falsi-
fied reality and everything it touched (“those are real cows, not school cows …”). It
is not without significance that a famous Spanish contemporary of Woolf’s, Azorín
(1873–1967) expressed the same separation of school and reality:
It was …where was it? It was a little village on the eastern coast of Spain; the school
was located at one end, adjacent to the market garden (…). Every morning, just after
the sun has risen over the distant blue mountains in this clear blue sky, the children go
to school; (…) slowly, very slowly, savouring with delight these moments of complete
freedom, delaying as much as possible their painful and inexorable captivity. But cap-
tivity is precisely what it is: we remember it as a vivid, disquieting image (…).
Now we are in school: there is a cheerful, noisy buzz of voices. And suddenly we all
fall silent: the teacher has appeared at the door. And the painful torment begins. Who
can fail to remember? Is there anyone who does not recall those agonising efforts to
retain what we do not understand –mysterious theodicy or arcane elementary arith-
metic those endless repetitions, that ordeal of remaining still and quiet for hours on
end, those silent and inexplicable sobs in which we unburden our first disappointments
in life, that sudden bitterness which appears for the first time to muddy our clear, naive
visions? Outside, the splendour of nature lives on: the trees are beautiful with their
dense, round foliage, the birds sing, the mountains stand out strikingly in the bright
daylight, the water trickles, murmuring along the ditches …. (Azorín 1972, 222–224)
2
And if Azorín spoke of captivity, another British author, George Bernard Shaw
(1856–1950), directly compared the schools of his time to prisons:
They send their children to school; and there is, on the whole, nothing on earth
intended for innocent people so horrible as a school. To begin with, it is a prison. But
it is in some respects more cruel than a prison. In a prison, for instance, you are not
forced to read books written by the warders and the governor (who of course would
not be warders and governors if they could write readable books), and beaten or other-
wise tormented if you cannot remember their utterly unmemorable contents. In the
prison you are not forced to sit listening to turnkeys discoursing without charm or
interest on subjects that they don’t understand and don’t care about, and are therefore
incapable of making you understand or care about. In a prison they may torture your
body; but they do not torture your brains; and they protect you against violence and
outrage from your fellow prisoners. In a school you have none of these advantages.
With the world’s bookshelves loaded with fascinating and inspired books, the very
manna sent down from Heaven to feed your souls, you are forced to read a hideous
190 M. Gómez et al.
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imposture called a school book, written by a man who cannot write: a book from
which no human being can learn anything: a book which, though you may decipher it,
you cannot in any fruitful sense read, though the enforced attempt will make you
loathe the sight of a book all the rest of your life. With millions of acres of woods and
valleys and hills and wind and air and birds and streams and fishes and all sorts of
instructive and healthy things easily accessible, or with streets and shop windows and
crowds and vehicles and all sorts of city delights at the door, you are forced to sit, not
in a room with some human grace and comfort or furniture and decoration, but in a
stalled pound with a lot of other children, beaten if you talk, beaten if you move, bea-
ten if you cannot prove by answering idiotic questions that even when you escaped
from the pound and from the eye of your gaoler, you were still agonizing over his
detestable sham books instead of daring to live. (Shaw 1910)
3
We could add pages and pages of such pejorative descriptions, opinions and memo-
ries of the schools of yesteryear. But this polarisation of memories can be under-
stood in two possible ways which we shall refer to as the objectivist and relativist
interpretations. The former gives us to understand that if school days are recalled
with such displeasure (or pleasure, as the case may be), it is because that is exactly
how they were experienced and it was the school that was chiefly responsible for
their being experienced in that way. The relativist interpretation, by contrast, has
reservations about the direct linear nature of this relationship, and claims that it can-
not simply be accepted that what is remembered coincides exactly with what was
experienced, or that the reason it was experienced in one way or the other was due
solely to the institutional framework in which the individual’s school days were
played out.
The Spanish psychiatrist, Castilla del Pino, points out that memories are evoca-
tions of past events. That is, they are representations that do not necessarily coincide
with what actually happened: “We recall things in different ways according to (1)
the conditions in which we found ourselves when the events took place; (2) the type
of event; and (3), the relationship that exists between the event being remembered
and the moment in which the memory is evoked”(Castilla Del Pino 2006, 17). We
should clarify, as indeed Castillo del Pino does, that because what is being recalled
fails to coincide precisely with the event actually experienced, this does not neces-
sarily mean the memory is false or, worse still, that the person remembering it sets
out with the intention of deceiving others or themselves.
This is not the place to explore the numerous mechanisms of the memory and
their distortions, which have been and continue to be widely studied within a variety
of disciplines.
4
But shifting the focus back to the subject specifically addressed in
this article, namely, the content and judgements present in recollections of childhood
educational experiences, it is worth stressing that the interpretive framework of the
rest of this article combines the objectivist and relativist interpretations introduced
earlier.
It is apparent that a certain amount of credibility ought to be given to these
memories and judgements. Thus, if, for instance, it turns out that various generations
overwhelmingly coincide in harbouring far from fond memories of their school
days, it must be accepted that this does not speak well of the schools they attended.
5
And if the opposite is true of subsequent generations, it should be acknowledged
that the schools of their childhood must have borne little resemblance to the deplor-
able schools of their predecessors. Nevertheless, it ought not to be forgotten that
memories are personal constructs built and rebuilt according to the moment in which
they are reactivated.
Educational Review 191
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Here, by combining the two interpretive focuses, this article is able to examine
the reality of the educational contexts in which participative educational experiences
were had, while exploring aspects of the moment in which they are recalled and the
personal characteristics of the individual recalling them.
6
And although in introduc-
ing this discussion here the focus has been on somewhat distant memories, the fol-
lowing sections will consider the memory of much more recent educational
experiences. To be precise, the aim of this article is to present the relevant findings
from a broader piece of research, which we summarise later.
7
Child participation and building citizenship
This study seeks to examine the medium-term effects of intense participation experi-
ences in three educational environments during childhood: namely, those of school,
leisure-time education (and, specifically, the Catalan esplais) and municipal chil-
dren’s councils (see later for full explanation).
But first we should specify certain concepts related to participation. Thus,
according to UNICEF: “Child participation must be authentic and meaningful. It
must start with children and young people themselves, on their own terms, within
their own realities and in pursuit of their own visions, dreams, hopes and concerns.
Most of all, authentic and meaningful child participation requires a radical shift in
adult thinking and behaviour –from an exclusionary to an inclusionary approach to
children and their capabilities.”
8
Casas, following Lansdown (2001), summarises the main features of “effective
participation”as follows:
the topic must have real relevance to children and the young; it must provide a dif-
ferential element (such as having results and generating long-term institutional change);
it must be linked to the everyday experiences of children and the young; it must have
sufficient material and time resources; it must generate realistic expectations for chil-
dren and the young; it must have objectives which are both clear and negotiated with
children and the young; it 30 must be directed to the promotion and protection of chil-
dren’s rights; it must have support from adults when necessary; and the methodology
employed must be developed in collaboration with the children and young people.
(Casas et al. 2008, 365–6)
Trilla and Novella distinguish between four types or levels of participation they call:
simple,consultative,projective and metaparticipation.
Simple participation would involve solely taking part in a process or activity as a
spectator or performing party, but without the subject having intervened in its
preparation or in decisions about its content or development. They are basically lim-
ited to following directions or responding to stimuli. Consultative participation goes
one step further by hearing the subjects. They are not mere spectators, performers or
users of something externally determined, but rather their views are requested on
matters that affect them.
The projective participant is more than simply a user and does more than simply
offer an opinion, becoming in fact a kind of agent. This is, therefore, a more demand-
ing form of participation, requiring greater commitment and co-responsibility, with a
condition for its exercise being that the participant should feel he or she is actually
part of the project. It is also a more complex type of participation which, at its highest
level, takes place in all the different phases of the activity: in the project definition
and determination of its objectives; in its design, planning and preparation; in its
management, execution and process control; and in its assessment.
192 M. Gómez et al.
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The fourth and final form of this classification is called metaparticipation, and
exists when the subjects themselves request, demand or generate new opportunities
and mechanisms for participation. It appears when an individual or collective
believes their participatory rights are not being recognised or when they think the
established channels are insufficient or ineffective (Trilla and Novella 2001). As we
have previously indicated, the experiences of child participation studied in our work
are situated at the level of what we have called projective participation.
In relation to the preceding paragraphs, our object of study are experiences that
involve “authentic”(UNICEF 2003), “effective”participation (Casas et al. 2008).
As such, we exclude those forms of participation that, elsewhere, we have labelled
“simple”, so as to focus specifically on what we conceptualise as “projective partic-
ipation”(Trilla and Novella 2001), and in all circumstances these experiences of par-
ticipation had a duration of at least two years in one of the three studied areas (that
is, school, leisure-time education or the municipal children’s council).
Now we should specify the three educational areas outlined earlier. The panor-
ama of participatory pedagogies in the twentieth century is broad and includes
attempts at introducing self-government by the European movements of the New
School and the Active School models (e.g. Ferrièrre, Montessori, Decroly, etc.) and
their followers (e.g. Freinet, the Italian Cooperative Education Movement, etc.); the
progressive education movement in the United States inspired by J. Dewey and his
disciples; the more radical, anti-authoritarian approaches (e.g. Summerhill, the
Hamburg Schools, etc.); Carl Rogers’non-directive education; the self-management
experiments of Institutional Pedagogy (e.g. Lobrot Lapassade, Oury and Franch);
and the “just community”approach promoted by Kohlberg, etc.
9
The participation experiences that we study here are more similar to those of the
European movement of the New School and the Active School and to Dewey’s pro-
gressive education in the United States than to those of the more radical, Summer-
hill-type (i.e. democratic education). Apple and Beane (2007, 10), in their
examination of “democratic schools”, capture perfectly the type of experiences to
which we refer:
To say that democracy rests on the consent of the governed is almost a cliché, but in a
democratic school it is true that all of those directly involved in the school, including
young people, have the right to participate in the process of decision-making. For this
reason, democratic schools are marked by widespread participation in issues of gover-
nance and policy-making. Committees, councils, and other schoolwide decision-
making groups include not only professional educators, but also young people, their
parents, and other members of the school community. In classrooms, young people and
teachers engage in collaborative planning, reaching decisions that respond to the con-
cerns, aspirations, and interests of both. This kind of democratic planning, at both the
school and the classroom levels, is not the “engineering of consent”toward predeter-
mined decisions that has too often created the illusion of democracy, but a genuine
attempt to honor the right of people to participate in making decisions that affect their
lives. (Apple and Beane 2007, 10)
In the school experiences studied here, the participation of the young is seen in the
organisation of community life and communal relations (conflict resolution, etc.) as
well as in the school’s pedagogical activities (the teaching methods and techniques),
all of which are facilitated by means of democratic structures and procedures operat-
ing at the class-group (meetings) and the school levels (delegates, representative
councils, commissions, etc.).
Educational Review 193
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The leisure-time activities examined here are those that children engage in at
what are known in Catalonia as esplais (Trilla, Ayuste, and Agud 2013) and which
share many of the features of the scouting movement. Children enrol and attend the
esplai centre regularly (usually on Saturday afternoons) throughout the year. The
activities are complemented by weekend excursions and summer camps.
Finally, the municipal children’s councils are participatory bodies created by a
number of town and city councils, made up of local children that meet regularly to
contribute, through their critical observations and suggestions, to improving the
environment in which they live.
Municipal children’s councils are composed of 20 to 30 boys and girls who live
in the city in question and are between 9 and 12 years old. Council members come
from state and private schools in the municipality and are elected by their class-
mates. Half of the council is renewed every year, so each councillor holds office for
two years. This annual renewal of half of the council enables methods of operation
and traditions that are created to be preserved and transmitted through a horizontal
socialisation process. “Veterans”hand down to newcomers both the formal rules of
the council as well as the rich resource of informal dynamics and shared experiences
that are continuously being generated. Ordinary council meetings are usually held
on a monthly basis, but depending on the activities being developed and the avail-
ability of members, extraordinary sessions and meetings of subgroups or commis-
sions may be called. Each children’s council has the support of an adult (appointed
and contracted by the City Council) who acts as the driving force behind its opera-
tion, however, the council is fully sovereign to decide on the matters to be
addressed.
10
The ones included in this study were among the first to be set up in the province
of Barcelona (in the late 1990s) based, above all, on the proposals of Francesco
Tonucci and his Children’s City project (Tonucci 1997,2004).
Our goal in adopting this approach was to corroborate a hypothesis that, explic-
itly or implicitly, is shared by all those pedagogies that seek to promote child partic-
ipation: namely, the participatory experiences of childhood contribute to shaping
future citizens that are critically minded, willing to participate and committed.
11
Specifically, we wished to explore the retrospective view young people have of their
childhood experiences (the way in which they recall them, the influences in their
present lives that they attribute to them, and so on).
12
In carrying out this study we combined quantitative (questionnaire) and qualita-
tive (in-depth interviews) techniques of analysis. The questionnaire (see later for
details) was given to two groups of subject, henceforth referred to as G1 and G2.
G1 comprised young people between the ages of 18 and 22 who, some 10 years ear-
lier, had had significant experience of participating in one of the three areas outlined
earlier (that is, school, leisure-time education or the municipal children’s council).
To locate, identify and select the experiences for subsequent study, we drew on a
number of reliable sources, including specific publications that made direct reference
to them, expert advice and details provided by educational renewal and leisure-time
education movements.
13
G2, which served to all intents and purposes as a control group, comprised
people in the same age range that had not had these participatory experiences in
their childhood, i.e. youngsters that attended not especially participatory schools or
leisure-time education centres. Clearly, the sub-group corresponding to that of the
children’s councils does not occur in G2, since these councils are, by their very
194 M. Gómez et al.
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nature, essentially participatory bodies. So, just as there are schools or leisure-time
education centres that do not especially foster participation, a children’s council that
practiced little or no participation would be a contradiction in terms.
The number of subjects included in each group and each of the three areas is
detailed in Table 1.
14
The questionnaire
15
was divided in three sections. The first contained several
items asking subjects about their memories of the days they had spent at the educa-
tional institution of reference and the influence that, in their opinion, it had exerted
on their life and on different aspects of the way they are and behave today; the sec-
ond section asked subjects about their subsequent participatory activity; and, the
third section asked them about their current attitude to participation and citizenship.
The questionnaire items that are of greatest interest to us here are both from the first
section. In the first of these we asked subjects to appraise the memory they have of
participating in the experience, on a scale from 0 (very bad) to 10 (very good). In the
second, an open question, subjects were asked to name the things (a maximum of three)
they remembered most from the period they spent at the institution of reference.
The questionnaire delving into subjects’memories of their childhood participatory
experiences was complemented with in-depth, individual, face-to-face interviews,
conducted with a sub-sample of G1 (see Table 1): 29 subjects between the ages of 18
and 22 who, some 10 years earlier, had had significant experience of participating in
one of the studied areas. They were distributed as follows: 10 from school, seven from
leisure-time education and 12 from municipal children’s councils.
Subjects were asked to explain, justify and, in their own words, expand upon the
answers they had given in the questionnaire. The script employed in the interviews
followed the same line as that taken by the questionnaire: analysis and retrospective
assessment of childhood participatory experiences; subsequent participatory
activities, and subjects’current attitudes to participation and citizenship.
16
In the section that follows we present and comment upon the main results of
the study, first, through a consideration of the quantitative results obtained via the
closed question on the questionnaire, and, second, through an examination of
the qualitative information obtained from the interviews and the open question on
the questionnaire.
Memory of childhood educational experiences
Our results show (Table 2)
17
that respondents, in general, have a highly positive
memory of their childhood educational experiences and that the bitter recollections
we highlighted in the introduction have been largely confined to the past. Yet,
marked differences are evident between those that engaged in participatory
experiences (G1) and those that did not (G2).
Table 1. Number of questionnaires and interviews, according to sample and area.
Questionnaires
G1 G2 Interviews
School 103 288 7
Leisure-time education 112 112 10
Children’s council 62 —12
Totals 277 400 29
Educational Review 195
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As Table 2shows, fairly large majorities in both groups declared they had very
good or quite good memories of the time they spent at these education centres; few
subjects recalled such memories as having little or no positive value. However, the
concentration of positive responses is much more marked among G1 subjects
(69.8% reported having very good memories versus 38% in G2). The reasons for
this difference are apparent in the interviews conducted with the respondents.
An examination of the results by educational area reveals a similar tendency to
that found in the overall results: subjects in G1 report a higher frequency of good
memories than their peers in G2. In the case of participatory schools, around 67% of
the subjects have very many good memories of their time spent there, a figure that
falls to 38.9% in the case of those schooled at normal schools. In the case of lei-
sure-time education this difference is even more marked. Those who attended
esplais had very many (72.3%) or quite a few (25.0%) good memories, while in the
control group only 35.7% reported having quite a few good memories of their lei-
sure-time education. In the case of the children’s councils (no controls available),
approximately 80% of subjects reported having fond memories of their participation
(38.7% very many and 41.9% quite a few).
Interestingly, the difference in the quality of memories between the two groups
is greater in the area of leisure-time than at school. Among G1 subjects there is a
marked concentration of very many good leisure-time memories, while among G2
subjects there is a more even distribution across the scale. This pattern is repeated to
some extent in the case of school, but the distributions in both groups tend to be
more homogeneous. A possible explanation for this is that school environments
tend, for better or for worse, to be more homogeneous than those of leisure-time
education. Regulations, controls, traditions and even what is expected of them carry
much greater weight in the case of schools than in that of leisure-time education
centres.
Equally noteworthy is the fact that the most positive memories correspond (and
here the difference is significant) to those reported by the G1 group in relation to their
time spent in the esplais, while the G2 group record their least fond memories (albeit
that they are not bad) in the equivalent area. This difference again is probably in part
attributable to the greater degree of internal diversification in this educational area. A
further plausible explanation concerns the subsequent links that the subjects establish
with this area of their childhood memories, given that the possibilities in this regard
are much greater than in the other two areas (membership of the children’s council is
Table 2. Comparison of frequencies of good memories, according to sample and area.
Good memories
None Few Normal Quite a few Very many
School G1 1.0% 0.0% 8.7% 23.3% 67.0%
G2 2.1% 3.8% 18.4% 36.8% 38.9%
Leisure time G1 0.0% 0.9% 1.8% 25.0% 72.3%
G2 1.8% 4.5% 22.3% 35.7% 35.7%
Children’s council G1 1.6% 1.6% 16.1% 41.9% 38.7%
G2
Overall G1 0.5% 0.5% 5.1% 24.2% 69.8%
G2 2.0% 4.0% 19.5% 36.5% 38.0%
χ
2
(3) = 1.85; P< 0.005.
196 M. Gómez et al.
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limited to two years and the time spent at primary school is also fixed). By contrast,
in the esplais the children can attend successive, age-related stages within the
organisation, eventually even changing their role and becoming a group leader (or
monitor). Moreover, attendance is voluntary and it is unlikely that adolescents could
be forced to remain members of such an organisation against their will. In this
respect, our research shows that it is the G1 subjects in this educational area (esplais)
who go on to participate most in general and, also, within this area.
Thus, those that enjoyed their time in the esplais had the opportunity to maintain
close, affective links to them, and indeed many chose to do so. This continuity
would appear to be a key factor in the positive feedback received. For example, “As
an adolescent and young person I continued to be involved with my esplai because
what I did there during my childhood was a really good experience”(LT-i-G1, see
later for coding); but, at the same time, the fact that this link was maintained serves
to reactivate, strengthen and even perhaps optimise these good memories from child-
hood. We would seem to have better memories of experiences associated with a par-
ticular context the more that context continues to provide us with enjoyable
experiences.
The contents of the memories: what is remembered most and why
As introduced earlier, we included a further item on the questionnaire to explore the
contents of the subjects’memories of their childhood educational experiences. Addi-
tionally, during the interviews conducted with the G1 sub-sample that had engaged
in participatory experiences we asked them to talk further about these memories.
18
Most of their recollections can be placed in one of two main categories: those con-
cerning people (and the relationships established with them) and those concerning
the activities carried out. This first category can be further broken down into the
way in which our subjects recall the people who exercised the role of educator
19
and the relationships they built up with their peers.
Educators in the memory
In line with our quantitative results (see earlier), respondents seem to hold quite
good memories of their educators. Indeed, by identifying the qualities they attribute
to them, we are able to construct ideal profiles for educators in each of the three
areas.
General or specific
Two types of memory can be distinguished: on the one hand, those that refer
generically to their educators: “I really liked the relationships I had with my
teachers”(SC-i), for instance; and on the other hand, those that refer to specific
educators: “The good relationship I had with one teacher, which continues to this
day”(SC-r-G1); “I remember one teacher who was a lot of fun”(SC-r-G2); “The
music classes: I had a brilliant teacher”(SC-r-G2); “My 3rd and 4th year teacher: I
liked her a lot”(SC-r-G2).
In the case of school memories, this second type of memory is more common
among G2 subjects, while those subjects (G1) who attended participatory schools
tend to have a favourable memory of the teaching staff as a whole. In some cases,
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the latter even recall other members of the school community, for example: “I also
have good memories of the staff. I mean, from the teachers to just about anyone you
could meet in the school (…). The person that opened the door, who knew us and
always said hello …I don’t know, it’s the feeling of belonging, of like being at
home”(SC-i). This last response is typical of expressions used by subjects when
recalling their experiences (for example, “feeling comfortable”,“feeling welcome”,
“like being among family”, etc.) and they tend to attribute this warm, welcoming
atmosphere to the work and the individual qualities of the educators.
Human quality and professional competence
In education, if it were possible to distinguish clearly between technical and method-
ological skills, on the one hand, and human and relationship-building qualities, on
the other hand, it would be the latter that respondents would surely mention when
identifying the educators they recall most fondly. Yet, there are those who refer
explicitly to teachers that possessed both qualities in equal measure: “Good teachers,
both as persons as well as in the way they taught”(SC-r-G2). Similarly when they
describe their teachers as having been “exemplary”or “excellent”, they are at the
same time implicitly attributing these teachers with both qualities.
However, what the respondents refer to most when describing those educators
that remain uppermost in their minds are certain human qualities, essentially those
of forging relationships built on proximity, trust, support, understanding, a willing-
ness to listen, happiness and “being treated well”:“The great atmosphere among the
school’s pupils, teachers and parents”(SC-r-G2); “The trust that existed between
pupils and teachers”(SC-r-G2); “The friendly relationship with the teachers”
(SC-r-G2); “The help, camaraderie, attention and support of the monitors who stood
by us through thick and thin”(LT-r-G1); “The monitors, who always gave us a
smile”(LT-r-G1); “As a point of reference, the monitors –for all the good times I
had with them and for the interest they showed in us”(LT-r-G1).
The educator as a model
This memory of the educator as a point of reference is a quality frequently associ-
ated with the esplai monitors, being mentioned above all by those who, as discussed
earlier, maintained links with the institution and who, in turn, took on the role of
monitors: “Now, as a monitor, it really helps me to remember the best monitors I
had as points of reference. (…) To remember what they did, the proximity …the
fact they were always willing to give you advice, half-way between being like a par-
ent and a friend. It left an impression on me and it is what, as a monitor myself, I
now try to transmit to the children”(LT-i); “I was a little girl who needed my moni-
tors a lot. And I suppose these things have made me continue [in the institution]: it
was a space where I could go and tell them the things I couldn’t tell my mother.
This confidence that they give you …; you feel supported by your monitors, and
they end up being a model to follow”(LT-i).
It takes all sorts
And yet, inevitably, some of the respondents harbour memories of less good-natured
educators. One recalls: “Relationships of every kind with the different teachers: from
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getting on well to feelings of loathing”(SC-r-G2); another speaks of: “A variety of
bizarre teachers”(SC-r-G2); and a third confesses to having had: “Teachers who
were interested in you and others who were mad”(SC-r-G2). However, in line with
the small percentage of bad memories reported earlier, negative reports were few
and far between. On balance, it is perhaps not surprising that among the most linger-
ing memories we find, at one extreme, excellent, open and friendly educators, while
at the other, we find the mad, the contemptible, the scornful and the outrageous; yet,
the more modest and the mediocre would seem to be less memorable.
Peer relationships
Likewise, the respondents reserve a special place in their memories for the class-
mates and friends with whom they shared their childhood experiences. Here again,
they can be divided into two categories: the friendships forged in the institution and
the relationships founded on the camaraderie and sense of solidarity they
experienced there.
Making lifelong friends
All three areas are ideal contexts for peer encounters and, hence, for forging friend-
ships. Unsurprisingly, many respondents refer to the friends they made during those
years as constituting the most enduring elements of their memories of their child-
hood experiences.
Not only are these friendships well lodged in the participants’memories, they
have also lasted into later life: “Friends that I still have today (…). The ones I con-
sider really true friends, the closest, are the friends I made in the ‘esplai’”(LT-i);
“The friends I’ve had all my life I met there”(SC-r-G2), etc. Some, moreover, recall
feelings that went beyond friendship: “My first boyfriend”(SC-r-G2); “The girl I
liked”(CC-r), and so on.
No great differences are perceived between G1 and G2 as regards the “making
of friends”, with subjects in both groups identifying the friendships they forged as
being among their best memories. This comes as no surprise; the basic condition for
“making friends”being simply the meeting of others and so even in the strictest,
most authoritarian communities, children manage to make friends.
Camaraderie, cooperation and solidarity
In the groups and communities we are addressing, not everyone becomes friends
with everyone else; yet, it is preferable that they share a sense of belonging to the
same group and of mutual support. This is frequently referred to in the recollections
recorded here:
“What I often remember on the positive side is the sense of solidarity among
classmates”(SC-i); “Belonging to a group made you consider the school was yours
…And I suppose the feeling that you form part of a group is what helps you grow
as a person”(SC-i); “I particularly remember the way the group stuck together”
(LT-r-G1).
The activities
Having identified the memories of those who participated in those experiences, we
turn now to examine just the specific details of these experiences. Later we
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summarise the most significant elements in their responses under three general
headings; however, given that the sense and purposes of the three areas studied
differ considerably, we often have to distinguish between them.
Dynamic activities
A prominent place in the memories is taken by the activities that might be classed
as dynamic. The respondents recall, above all, two types of school activity: those
undertaken in specific subjects where the “putting into practice”of what they had
learned turned out to be essential, even in the more traditional school contexts: “The
subject of music: performing songs and playing instruments, singing in the choir
and so on”(SC-r-G1); “Handicrafts: painting, building figures and other craftwork”
(SC-r-G1). Subjects also recalled the more dynamic, active lessons received in a
range of subjects: “In the natural science classes we always practiced on real
animals. For instance, we brought in animals’lungs, sheep’s heads and so on”
(SC-r-G1); “When we played games to get a better understanding of the language”
(SC-r-G2).
In all of these instances the point was to apply (practice, experiment, build, train,
etc.) what was being learned. The tasks assigned to pupils required their total and
active participation, taking them well beyond their traditional tasks of listening,
studying, and memorising, etc. In short, it seems that it is more memorable to be an
active agent than a passive receiver of information. This was summed up graphically
by one of the respondents, who remembered with special fondness those “moments
in which we were made to feel the centre of attention”(SC-r-G2).
The second class of activities recalled were those conducted outside the class-
room in the playground, dining hall, or when arriving and leaving school. Interest-
ingly, these non-academic moments appear in their memories with a frequency that
greatly exceeds the significance usually attributed to them: “The midday break, play-
ing games and sharing in conversations with the monitors”(SC-r-G1); “Times in the
playground when we joined in fights, games and other experiences, and when we
settled our quarrels”(SC-r-G2); “The dining hall, where all the pupils from the dif-
ferent years gathered together in one space, without any kind of academic pressure”
(SC-r-G2).
Extraordinary activities
In all three educational areas, a special emphasis is placed on activities that might
be referred to as “extraordinary”, i.e. those that break with the routine, either
because of their intensity or the degree of involvement they called for, the level of
motivation with which they were carried out, their innovative nature, the setting in
which they were conducted (outside the normal institutional boundaries), the com-
plexity of their organisation requiring the subjects to take an active role, or because
of their external projection. We refer to visits to activity centres, going camping,
going on a trip, taking part in a student exchange or in traditional festivals, cultural
and sporting events, or participating in some sort of campaign, etc.
Activities of this kind seem to abound in the memories that young people have
of their childhood experiences. The routine, the usual and the ordinary, despite being
what we invest most real time in, remains embedded in the memory as a uniform
mass; but, the extraordinary is always more memorable.
200 M. Gómez et al.
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Participatory activities
Finally, we turn to look at what the respondents remember about participating in the
wider community of which their centres formed a part and their involvement in the
running and organisation of their activities. Unsurprisingly, it is the members of G1
who have accumulated most memories.
Former members of the children’s councils –the purpose of which was to act as
the mouthpiece of the young and to enable them to intervene and collaborate in
improving their local environment –spoke of their involvement in the following
terms: “… the feeling that you can change things in your town, things you don’t like
and that could be improved. And seeing that you have that capability, even though
you’re very young”(CC-i); “We made a commercial to raise people’s awareness of
the benefits of public transport”(CC-i); “We held meetings with various schools
from areas that were extremely different, each with its own problems, and everyone
was able to express their concerns and suggestions freely, knowing they were being
listened to”(CC-r).
Participating in the organisation of activities and managing the life of the group
drew the following comments: “All through the years of primary school, one day a
week there was a small class meeting in which we had discussions and made short-
and long-term proposals about the organisation of the school’s premises, time,
materials and activities”(SC-r-G1); “I learned how to stand up for my opinion, to
defend it and to find a way to get someone to listen to me”(CC-i); “Taking part
made me feel involved; the fact that it was us who had to take decisions”(CC-i);
“I’ve learned to feel that your opinion matters and that you shouldn’t keep the things
you think to yourself, because maybe other people think the same as you”(CC-i).
What they all seem to be saying is that they learned to participate and by recognis-
ing this they are also revalidating the basic principle of pedagogical activism:
namely, the most effective way of learning how to participate is by participating.
Summary
We began this article with various testimonies in which the experience of school
was recounted in a highly negative fashion; moreover, we argued that such memo-
ries were by no means the exception of those whose schooldays were lived in the
twentieth century and, of course, the centuries that preceded it. However, on the
basis of the data obtained in this study we can confirm that, in general, today’s
young people hold somewhat better memories of their schooldays.
It is nevertheless curious that when schooling was not yet open to everyone,
some of these privileged few should recall it in such negative terms. Yet, today, now
that schooling is largely universal, memories tend to be far more positive. Seen in a
historical perspective, this gradual extension of schooling has been accompanied by
a substantial improvement in the wellbeing of its users. This progress, of course, has
not always been linear; there have been –and there continue to be –sporadic reac-
tionary periods, the fruit of adverse economic situations and retrograde education
policies. However, a broad historical review clearly demonstrates the progress to
which we allude.
Yet, while schooling today happily no longer resembles the abhorrent conditions
of the past, not everyone recalls their experiences with equal satisfaction. Obviously,
even today, there are good and bad schools: some that generate happy memories,
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others less so. Some of these differences have been described in the course of the
preceding discussion, but one of the factors that seems to have a marked influence
on just how the educational experience is recalled is the degree to which the
institution was able to make its pupils feel involved in its organisation.
Our quantitative results show that young people who attended institutions that pro-
moted participation have very good memories of them; memories that appear to be
more positive than those of their peers who attended other centres. However, this find-
ing alone is not sufficient for us to establish a strict causal relation. Undoubtedly, the
quality of educational experiences depends not solely on the pupils’participation, but
upon an array of diverse variables and factors that further research needs to ascertain.
This said, our qualitative results provide additional evidence that participating
has a positive impact on the way school experiences are remembered. Our subjects
explicitly acknowledge that this factor has contributed to their recalling their school-
days with satisfaction. They specifically recognise that the institutions they attended
created the conditions in which they could express themselves freely and where they
felt they were listened to. They also valued the fact that they could take decisions,
negotiate agreements, take part in projects, involve themselves in the organisation of
matters affecting the institution, and take on a range of different responsibilities, all
of which were a direct reflection of their ability to participate.
And attitudes and participatory skills are an essential part of the exercise of
democratic citizenship. As John and Evelyn Dewey (1915, 304) point out:
Responsibility for the conduct of society and government rests on every member of
society. Therefore, every one must receive a training that will enable him to meet this
responsibility, giving him just ideas of the condition and needs of the people collec-
tively, and developing those qualities which will insure his doing a fair share of the
work of gov-ernment. If we train our children to take orders, to do things simply
because they are told to, and fail to give them confidence to act and think for them-
selves, we are putting an almost insurmountable obstacle in the way of overcoming the
present defects of our system and of establishing the truth of democratic ideals. Our
State is founded on freedom, but when we train the State of tomorrow we allow it just
as little freedom as possible. Children in school must be allowed freedom so that they
will know what its use means when they become the controlling body, and they must
be allowed to develop active qualities of initiative, independence, and resourcefulness,
before the abuses and failures of democracy will disappear.
It is our hope that this article and our study might serve to strengthen the idea that
participating in childhood educational establishments is not only a democratic right
–which in itself is sufficient to justify the concept, but also one that contributes to
the quality of experiences at these establishments and, thus, to their being recalled
fondly at a later date. An educational experience that is memorable has a two-fold
value: it served to educate the individual in its day and it continues to educate that
individual each time it is recalled.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Funding
This work was supported by the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación (Ministry of
Science and Innovation) [Fundamental Research Projects Ref. EDU2009–10967].
202 M. Gómez et al.
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Notes
1. This is readily confirmed in the numerous compilations of literary texts about school-
days (for example, Craig 1994; Lass and Tasman 1981; Lomas 2011) and studies dedi-
cated to their analysis (Barone 1988; Jackson and Haroutinian-Gordon 1989; Trilla
2002; Viñao 2002).
2. The book Artículos olvidados de J. Martínez Ruiz (1894–1904) was published in 1972,
but the article in which the quotation appears is from 1903.
3. The piece by Bernard Shaw is taken from a text published by the writer as a prologue
to his play Misalliance (1910). It is included in his essay A Treatise on Parents and
Children (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/908/908-h/908-h.htm#link2H_4_0010).
4. There is a branch of psychology specialised in the study of what is known as autobio-
graphical memory (Baddeley 2010; Manzanero 2008; Thompson et al. 1998). Histori-
ography –and specifically the epistemology of history –has also not ignored questions
concerning the reliability of memory (Alted 1996; Le Goff 1992; Mudrovcic 2005;
Ricoeur 2004).
5. Antonio Viñao uses well-chosen examples to refer to the shared memory that each
generation holds of its school experiences in the context of Spain’s education system in
the twentieth century (Viñao 2011).
6. In other sections we have indicated a possible slant as regards the origin of school
memories converted into literature (be it fiction or in memoirs). Those whose school
memories we know best (because they are also those who have engaged most in pub-
lishing them) are writers, intellectuals and, in general, people from the world of culture
and art. In other words, people with a generally more developed critical sensitivity and
spirit for whom the encounter with a highly disciplined and regulated world such as that
of the traditional school must have been especially difficult and emotional. “The image
that men and women of letters offer us of the school should not be considered necessar-
ily representative of the image the average pupil would give us. Because they are former
pupils who, to a certain extent, when talking of the school do so from a privileged posi-
tion, with the effectiveness and lucidity endowed upon them by their skills as writers.”
(Carbonell et al. 1987, 23).
7. Trilla et al.: Participación infantil y construcción de la ciudadanía. Spanish Ministry of
Science and Innovation, Fundamental Research Projects, Ref. EDU2009-10,967.
8. http://www.unicef.org/sowc03/contents/childparticipation.html.
9. For a brief but clear overview of different progressive school models (and a list of basic
sources), see Puig (2001). For the more classic sources for the various democratic, anti-
authoritarian and participatory pedagogies, see Dewey (1916), Neill (1960), Rogers
(1969), Power, Higgins, and Kohlberg (1989), Gutmann (1999), and Apple and Beane
(2007).
10. For further information about the composition, functions and operation of these coun-
cils, see: Trilla and Novella 2001,2011.
11. For further information on this idea of participatory, critical and committed citizenship,
see Trilla 2010.
12. The aim of this article is to present the results of our research, which refer exclusively
to the memories subjects hold of participatory experiences they had in their childhood.
We present in other works, in the process of publication or already published, the
results and conclusions of our other research aims: the impact on their lives and on
subsequent participatory experiences which, according to the subjects’perception, those
experiences had (Novella et al. 2014); and on the subjects’present conception of
citizenship (Novella et al. 2013).
13. The research team has a proven track record studying participatory experiences in these
areas, including publications (see Reference section), direction of doctoral theses
(Galceran 2000; Morata 2010; Novella 2005) and consulting. To ensure the relevance
of the experiences selected, we also conducted direct observation and interviews with
those responsible for the centres.
14. It was far from easy to obtain the anticipated number of participants for G1 (that is, 100
for each of the three areas), given the length of time that had passed since they had had
these experiences. Nonetheless, eventually we gathered the desired number of intervie-
wees, with the exception of former children’s council members, reflecting the extremely
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limited number of children’s councils that operated 10 years ago (note the first councils
in the metropolitan area of Barcelona were created around 1998). Despite the total num-
ber of possible subjects for this third area being naturally low, we were able to include
62 subjects which, in relation to the total population of possible subjects, is very high
indeed.
15. Construction of the questionnaire was conducted with the participation of eight experts
in the field of study. Three were from our research team and five were key people in
the representative organisations of one of the three fields being studied (schools, esplais
and children’s councils). A pilot study was subsequently carried out with a smaller
number of young people to refine and validate the content and final draft of the ques-
tionnaire.
16. These semi-structured interviews, lasting on average some 60 minutes, were prepared in
line with the guide and conducted by members of the research team. Subsequently,
inductive categorical content analysis was conducted using Atlas.ti software.
17. To facilitate this analysis, results on the scale (0 to 10) were converted to the number of
positive experiences: none,few,average number,quite a few and very many.
18. From here on our discussion of the results does not distinguish between responses that
were obtained via the open question in the questionnaire and those obtained from the
interview. To identify the educational area and the origin of the subjects’responses,
however, we use the following codes: SC (school); LT (leisure-time education), CC
(children’s council); r (reply to the open question on the questionnaire), i (reply
recorded during the interview); and for the respondents, G1 and G2, in accordance with
the earlier explanation.
19. We use the word educator here in a broad sense; it includes the monitors and teachers
at school as well as the monitors, facilitators or educators in the leisure-time activities
or associated with the children’s council.
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