A New Approach for Investigating Children’s Participation Rights in Early Childhood Education

Abstract Research into children’s participation rights has largely focused on the challenges for early childhood educators to navigate children’s participation rights enactment. The aim of this article is to show how the enactments of children’s participation rights in an educational setting can be identified using a new approach, Listening to Voices in Interaction for Participation (LViIP). LViIP is based on Lundy’s (2007) conceptualisation of Article 12(1) and combines with conversation analysis ( ca ) to identify how rights enactment sequentially unfolds and how the interactants mobilise (or gatekeep) opportunities for children to have a say. A step-by-step worked example of LViIP shows in detail how participatory approaches by educators and children are built in early childhood education, thus demonstrating which interactional practices contribute towards the co-construction of children’s participation rights and how early childhood professionals can listen, be and do as duty-bearers of children’s rights in their daily practice.