The Ladder of Participation: Trying to be honest!

The sociologist Roger Hart wrote a book called Children’s Participation: The Theory And Practice Of Involving Young Citizens In Community Development And Environmental Care for UNICEF in 1997. This approach put the work of young people and adult allies around the world in the context of a global movement for participation. It offers you, your teachers and the parents an amazing possibility: to be honest about how we integrate children and youth into decision making processes. Too often, children on a stage, during a meeting in an event, and even in a theatrical play are treated as mere decoration, or minorities are integrated as tokens to make us feel better. (http://www.freechild.org/ladder.htm)