Quality in Extended Education: Benefits and Use of Extended Education from the perspective of children and young people
Creators: name: Chiapparini, Emanuela
name: Näpfli, Jasmin
Publisher: name: (:unav)
Year: 2024
Subjects: Extended Education
Quality
Users Perspective
socio-pedagogical user research
students at school

description: Extended education in its current form does not always have the expected effect.The effects that do occur depend on its quality and its structure. As a result, there has been an increasing focus on examining concepts of quality in extended ed-ucation in a quantitative way based on the perspective of adults. Pedagogical childhood research advocates seeing children as experts in their learning experiences and involves them activly in research as their perspectives, and judgments may differ from those of adults regarding quality. Further, in the current discussion about theory of quality the objectivist theoretical position is well known: quality standards or features are defined that characterize a certain object or subject area. Here, quality is attempted to be justified by the nature of the object itself. This theoretical position ignored the fact that quality is "relative to the person using the term and dependent on the con-texts in which it is used". In the framework of a relational theory of quality is conceived as a reflexive construct, fundamentally related to discourse. The focus is on the negotiation processes of different actors as to what is to be understood as quality for them in a certain context. According to this theoretical framework of quality, it seems central to take the children's and young people's view of these offers into consideration in order to find out more about the benefits they attribute to these offers and to further develop this with the feedback of the users - in accordance with service theory approaches. This contribution of the symposium compares two studies in terms of similarities and differences in benefits and use of Extended Education from the users' perspective. One study looked at Ex-tended Education at primary school level and the other at Extended Education at secondary school level in the same Swiss canton. Both studies used qualitative methods: to determine the children's views group discussions and young people’s views with ethnographic observation units and semi-structured interviews) were conducted. The data was analyzed by using qualitative content analysis. Our expected results would be that the benefits are similar between the offers in the different school levels, but the user strategies differ due to the different structure (especially voluntariness and age). The results seem to emphasize that extended education offer must be conceived and designed as a space that enables negotiation processes between the various actors involved. While school is classically seen as an institution in which there is a power imbalance between adults and children or young people, extended education offers the potential to be designed as a space of relatively balanced of power dynamics, enabling comprehensive negotiation processes. Professionals in the extended education can play a central role here in the school context, on the one hand with its claim to enable the participation of children and young people, and on the other hand with its understanding of education that presupposes intersubjective recognition processes.