The Future of Children's Rights, Educational Research and the UNCRC in a Digital World: possibilities and prospects

This chapter provides a critical discussion of how the UNCRC can shape methodological practices in educational research and how existing practices may be influenced with the ready access to, and development of, digital technologies. Key issues surrounding how the UNCRC is and should be informing educational research practices are discussed and contextualised within ethical and methodological positionings. In utilising a children’s rights frame, this chapter further explores the opportunities and tensions that the UNCRC creates for educational researchers. While the availability of technology may increase the potential for actualising participatory methods that are more responsive to the methods that children seek to engage with in their free time, it also presents a number of challenges from an ethical and methodological standpoint. Technology changes the way in which individuals and communities interact with one another and the outside world. Both children’s and adults’ everyday lifeworlds are filled with a balance between the ‘real’ world and the cyber world and as the line between these two worlds is increasingly blurred, new opportunities for researchers seeking to understand children’s lifeworlds in different contexts may be presented.