Education, Voice and Empowerment: Learning with and from Children in Poverty

Abstract

The social construction of childhood as a period of dependence, innocence and passivity often works to silence children’s voices and undermine the contributions that they can, and do, make to their social worlds. Children in poverty face a double disadvantage in this regard. On the one hand, they are viewed as incapable of participation for their alleged incapacities due to being young. On the other, these children are framed through deficit discourses that identify them as sites of problems in need of external interventions. In this chapter, we interrogate some of these discourses. We engage with accounts from five children living in an urban slum in Bangladesh to examine their experiences ..