Introduction

This chapter presents a series of reflections on children's participation and inclusion from a geographical perspective. It begins by giving a brief overview of recent work on children's spaces in human geography, going on to explore some of the key concepts the geographical imagination has to offer the theorisation of children's participation and inclusion. With this conceptual framework in place, it then looks at research on children and their relationships to school spaces. It concludes by drawing out some problems that this literature raises for the creation of participatory and inclusive spaces. Throughout, the intention is not to provide a fully worked-out argument or a set of answers, but rather to open up and explore some questions about participation and inclusion, with the help of conceptual resources derived from human geography.

Children's geographies

As early as the 1970s, suggestions were made for a possible geography of children (see Bunge, 1973), and during the seventies and eighties a small literature developed around this topic within the discipline of geography (see, for example, Blaut and Stea, 1971; Hart, 1979; Matthews, 1984, 1987; Gold and Goodey, 1989). However, at the start of the nineties, James (1990) identified the need for geographers to pay much more attention to the social-spatial dimensions of childhood, calling for research ‘which critically examines the ways in which children's lives, experiences, attitudes and opportunities are socially and spatially structured’ (p 278). By the turn of the century, this call seemed to have been answered, and a recognisable sub-discipline of children's geographies formed (Holloway and Valentine, 2000; Matthews, 2003).

Some geographers have paid attention to the history of children spaces (Ploszajska, 1994, 1998; Gagen, 2000a, 2000b). However, human geographers’ most distinctive contribution to childhood studies has been the exploration of how spaces and places are involved in the construction of childhood and children's lives. Thus, for example, there has been much recent work on urban childhoods (for example, Katz, 1994; Lynch, 1997; Chawla, 1998; Kong, 2000; O’Brien et al, 2000) and, following Philo's (1992a) call, a corresponding interest in children in rural places (e.g. Katz, 1991; Valentine, 1997; Jones, 1999, 2000; Matthews et al, 2000a; Tucker and Matthews, 2001).