Negotiating the Essentials for Education in Democratic Societies
ESAI Conference 2025
"What's a Student Council?"
Initial Findings in Student-led Negotiated Curriculum for Democratic Education through NEEDS: Negotiating the Essentials for Education in Democratic Societies.
1. UNESCO[1] have warned that democracy is backsliding, calling for a new social contract for education to reinvigorate democracies and strengthen student voice. These concerns are reflected in the Framework for Junior Cycle and while existing literature recognises the potential to revolutionize education, no framework translating this theory into practice exists[1]. This vital framework is developed by NEEDS.
Negotiated Integrated Curriculum (NIC) enables personal/social integration by developing curriculum around students’ personal and global concerns[2], creating a context-sensitive framework that empowers students as co-constructors of curriculum, explicitly placing student voice at the centre.
2. NEEDS represents a qualitative case study methodology of 4 post-primary schools, utilizing a dual methodological approach to engage in an empirical, evidence-based study of the affordances of NIC for Global Citizenship Education (GCE). A socio-ecological approach[3] establishes conditions for sustained participant engagement with the research, while a socio-cultural approach leverages 100 hours of unhurried time within the formal curriculum for the NIC process as a "Negotiated Learning" Junior Cycle Short Course. The context-sensitive NEEDS framework aims to act as an evidence-based demonstration initiative of education through democracy to redesign curriculum with the future-proofed capacity to evolve, responding to UNESCO’s call.
Methods include observations, field notes, artefacts, surveys and teacher (n=8) and student (n=43) focus-groups, complemented by close-topractice research with teachers through practitioner inquiry to reflectively capture incidental learning. Toolkits tracking developments in Voice/Participation, Self-Direction and Wellbeing will provide insight into participant Agency and changes in beliefs. Interpretive approaches to qualitative analysis will recursively develop codes across datasets to achieve theoretical saturation, creating a series of insight-rich case studies.
3. Initial findings suggest that despite efforts to substantiate Student Voice throughout Junior Cycle, it may still face the threat of tokenistic approaches within varied post-primary contexts. Preliminary analysis suggests that both students and teachers have different understandings of agency and what it means to have an authentic voice in one’s education.
An inattention on practice-centred curriculum development and the complex workings of contextspecific schooling has stagnated curriculum theorizing. The NEEDS framework enables the conditions for authentic, agentic student engagement through sustained Cooperative Social Inquiry, suspending judgement, developing tolerance and taking intelligent action. This will act as a roadmap for schools to adopt the contextsensitive NEEDS approach for GCE through democracy, contributing to innovative, generative theorising in curriculum studies. Support from the NCCA, European Wergeland Centre, WorldWise Global Schools, NAPD, ACCS and European Democratic Education Community highlights the gap this research fills.
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