Children’s Understanding of the Concept of Dissent: Mapping Prior Knowledge1
Andrew S. Hughes, Alan Sears, Kim Bourgeois, Barbara Corbett, Barbara
Hillman and Neyda Long
University of New Brunswick, Canada
Corresponding Author:
Dr. Andrew S. Hughes
Faculty of Education
University of New Brunswick
Fredericton, N.B.
Canada
E3B 6E3
Telephone: (506) 453-5163
e-mail: hughesa@unb.ca
1
This work has been supported, in part, by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities
Research Council of Canada.
Children’s Understanding of the Concept of Dissent
2
ABSTRACT
Children’s Understanding of the Concept of Dissent: Mapping Prior
Knowledge
This paper presents findings from a program of research concerned
with mapping children’s and young people’s understanding of core principles of
life in democratic societies. In this case the focus is upon the concept of dissent.
The work emanates from a concern that while tacit recognition is often given to
the need to appreciate the prior knowledge that children bring with them to the
learning situation, there has been little systematic work in the field of citizenship
education addressing the issue. Data were generated using a phenomenographic
research method aimed at identifying the qualitatively different ways in which
individuals understand a phenomenon. The resulting analysis shows children and
young people to construe the concept of dissent in terms of three major themes:
deference, dialog and defiance.
Children’s Understanding of the Concept of Dissent
3
Children’s Understanding of the Concept of
Dissent: Mapping Prior Knowledge
In this paper we present findings from work concerned with mapping children’s
and young people’s conceptions of a constellation of ideas that shape life in societies
committed to democratic principles. Our interest is in ideas that shape and give direction
to civil and civilized being. These are ideas such as freedom, dissent, diversity, due
process, equity and equality, human rights, privacy, property, the rule of law and
tolerance; ideas shown to be among common principles of democracy across societies
even when the institutions devised to advance the principles differ (Beetham 1994; Simon
1996). Broadly speaking, we are concerned with how children and young people
construe these ideas and how their understandings grow. Here, we report findings related
to children’s understanding of the concept of dissent.
Prior Knowledge
One of the commonplaces of teaching is that we should begin with what the
learner already knows. Certainly, we know that there is a strong relationship between
this prior knowledge and subsequent performance, as evidenced by a synthesis of some
183 studies by Dochy, Segers & Buehl (1999). Quite simply, the “kinds and amounts of
knowledge one has before encountering a given topic . . . affect how one constructs
Children’s Understanding of the Concept of Dissent
4
meaning” (Leinhardt, 1992, p.21). As a practical implication, learning theorists say:
“First, teachers must be familiar with, respect and actively use students’ prior knowledge
as they teach” (Newmann, Marks & Gamoran, 1996, p.285). It is a fundamental tenet of
a constructivist approach to teaching and learning (DeCorte, 1990). In principle, the
process is quite straightforward. It seeks to apply Ausubel’s dictum that “the most
important single factor influencing learning is what the learner already knows. Ascertain
this and teach him accordingly” (1968, p.vi). In practice, however, the teacher faces two
daunting tasks.
The first is to ascertain what the student already knows, or more
precisely, what a whole class or several classes of students already know. The second is
to determine what is implied by the term ‘accordingly.’
The research literature approaches the concept of prior knowledge from a variety
of perspectives, each with its own terminology. There is reference to current knowledge
and preknowledge, permanent stored knowledge and the prior knowledge state, archival
memory, experiential knowledge, background knowledge and personal knowledge; there
is a literature on misconceptions, naïve understandings and primitives, preunderstanding,
PKR (pieces of knowledge and reasoning), students’ descriptive and explanatory
systems, children’s science, and alternative frameworks (Byrnes & Torney-Purta, 1995;
Hill, 1995; Minstrell & Hunt, 1991; Gilbert, Osborne & Fensham, 1982; Hewson &
Hewson, 1982). What they all possess in common is the view of prior knowledge as a
launch pad to future learning. The knowledge distilled from previous experiences “are
the hooks upon which new learning is hung [with] previous experiences . . . the filters
Children’s Understanding of the Concept of Dissent
5
through which we interpret new information” (Rakow, 1992, p.18). Certainly, we know
that our students do not come to us as platonic blank slates. Both intuitively and
empirically we know that they bring a rich array of experiences that have shaped their
being and their belief. Witness the nascent theory of justice among the smallest of
children who protest that the actions of their playmates are “no fair.” Scarcely
grammatical in their utterance, they have begun for forge a sense of what is fair and
unfair, what is just and unjust. The problem, though, is that while teachers and parents
have observed the phenomenon of this early shaping of ideas, there has been no
systematic attempt to map children’s conceptions of the core ideas of democratic living,
in a manner that would be of value in planned teaching and learning.
The Topography of Dissent
In this research, the focus was upon children’s and young people’s
understanding(s) of the concept of dissent. This is one of the concepts that lie at the core
of the democratic spirit. It is generally viewed as a dynamic force that produces growth
in every aspect of human endeavor. Riga (1995) argues that dissent must be tolerated,
even institutionalized (as in parliamentary democracies with ‘loyal oppositions’) because
“it might truly reflect a dimension of truth which today is hidden from us, but which
tomorrow we may see more clearly” (p.71). In the aftermath of the Civil War, Frederick
Douglass proclaimed that “those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate
agitation, are men who want crops without plowing the ground. They want rain without
Children’s Understanding of the Concept of Dissent
6
thunder . . . they want the ocean without the roar of its waters.” Dissent is a force that
positively shapes both science and art; in political and civil society, it informs the
debates about how we govern ourselves, whether locally, nationally or globally.
Among the central tenets of democracy is the belief that the just powers of the
government derive from ‘the consent of the governed.’ The related notions of ‘popular
consent’ and ‘sovereignty of the people’ imply that citizens must participate in the
shaping of society, not just by providing and withholding consent, but through active and
vigorous dissent when called for. Of course, the instruments of participation are varied:
voting and lobbying, campaigning, marches and sit-ins, freedom rides and hunger strikes,
protests, demonstrations and disruptions; there are even “the weapons of the weak” –
“foot-dragging, desertion, dissimulation, false compliance, pilfering and feigned
ignorance” (Scott, 1985, p.xvi). To be skillful citizens, young people need to learn this
instrumentation of participation, much of it concerned with the expression of the
dissenting viewpoint; but to be mindful citizens, they also need to learn something of its
spirit. But where does it come from? How is it learned? How can it be nurtured?
Of course, there is a long tradition of research examining the nature of children’s
thinking on a range of social issues. Such work has clearly established that children’s
views of the world become more sophisticated, complex, abstract, articulate and assertive
as they grow older. (Turiel, (1983); Kohlberg, 1981; Piaget, 1973.) Such conclusions
address the form of thinking displayed by children but say little about the content of the
thinking itself. They can tell a teacher how the character of children’s thinking might
Children’s Understanding of the Concept of Dissent
7
develop but say nothing about what they are actually thinking. What such work does not
address is the children’s prior knowledge.
Mapping Conceptions
The technical challenge in the research has been to find ways of capturing and
portraying students’ prior understandings. For most people, and particularly for children,
direct as questioning such as by asking “what do you understand by the term freedom, or
dissent, or equity” does not provide much in the way of rich information (Turiel, 1983,
p.87). All people, including children, are likely to know much more than they can
articulate in abstract terms; hence their tendency to represent their views in terms of
instances and exemplars. Even direct observation seems limited in its potential. For
example, in our community, just recently, students in a school found themselves
threatened by an administrator for signing a petition; in another, school administrators
removed notices announcing the availability of support services for gay students. Both
situations would appear to be fertile ground for uncovering children’s conceptions of
some core democratic ideas. The problem, though, is that such naturally occurring events
are not always amenable to systematic study. Indeed, such events are anxiety ridden and
potentially traumatic and school administrators, teachers, parents and students can view
researchers as unwelcome intruders, more likely to inflame the situation than to
illuminate it.
Children’s Understanding of the Concept of Dissent
8
In our quest to find a mechanism to capture children’s and young people’s
conceptions of the ideas of democracy, we have gravitated increasingly toward a
phenomenographic procedure. Phenomenography is a research specialization “aimed at
the mapping of the qualitatively different ways in which people experience,
conceptualise, perceive, and understand various aspects of, and various phenomena in the
world around them” (Marton, 1988, pp. 178-179). The approach centers on the
phenomenographic interview with “the interviewer responsible for trying to see the
phenomenon as it is seen by the interviewee” (Bruce, 1994, p.50). ‘Seeing,’ of course, is
a metaphor for how students organize and structure their ideas. The objective of the
research is to construct an image of students’ cognitive schemata. Since we cannot
observe these structures directly, we infer them (Torney-Purta, 1991). Within the
framework of the phenomenographic interview, we make use of a semi-projective
technique. The semi-projective method is an extension of projective methods used in
personality assessment but the “stimulus content is more structured and culturally
patterned.” (Greenstein & Tarrow, 1970, p. 501) In this case, students were asked to
“project” themselves into an authentic situation dealing with the issue of school dress
codes. Here they used “think aloud” procedures to describe and explain the behavior of
the actors in the situation, and to imagine what their own responses would have been.
Students may be unrestrained but the stimulus itself possesses a subject matter that serves
to focus attention. In this research, the stimulus consisted of a storyboard of an actual
event. The task of the interviewer was to probe the “internal and external horizons of the
Children’s Understanding of the Concept of Dissent
9
interviewee’s experience” (Bruce, p. 50). The interviewer seeks out the elements that are
the focus of attention, is sensitive to examples, comparisons and analogies, and
encourages exploration and elaboration of areas of confusion or paradox.
The phenomenographic interviewer probes both percepts and concepts; what is
seen and what is made of what is seen. In one of the schools in the study, the characters
in the story are shown vandalizing school property. In the other three, the story
concludes with the characters continuing to violate the original school policy. The latter
ending was provided to accommodate concerns that the story would imply vandalism to
be a legitimate action in situations where there is disagreement.
In each interview, the objective was to discern the elements that shaped the way
the episode was experienced. The findings confirm the general pattern of a wide range of
phenomenographic work. That is, the number and configuration of elements that reveal
themselves in each individual’s responses varies but is not unlimited. It is quite clear that
there is “a limited number of qualitatively different ways of experiencing a phenomenon”
(Marton, 1996, p. 183).
The phenomenographic analysis proceeds from the identification of the elements
that matter to each individual to the mapping of elements that are common to several
individuals. In the first instance, individual concept maps were generated based on
verbatim interview transcripts. Comparison across the individual cases sought recurring
elements; and it was these recurring elements that were named phenomenographic
themes. It is the existence of such themes that allows us to characterize ways of
Children’s Understanding of the Concept of Dissent
10
experiencing an episode in terms of a finite number of categories. The practical
implication for teaching is that this permits us to recognize and respect the individual
integrity of each one of our students but also admits the common though not uniform
countenance in how they experience the world. Fundamentally, it permits us to think in
terms of how children typically make sense of their experience. The objective here is not
to obliterate differences among children in some sort of futile attempt to characterize “a
typical child;” rather, it is to identify the range of conceptions likely to be held.
The data we report here come from interviews with 54 children in grades
2, 6, 8, and 12 (the modal ages were 7, 11, 13 and 17). They were from four different
schools located in small towns (population  50,000). Children were interviewed
individually by their own teachers who were also trained members of the research group.
In each instance, the interviewer related an occurrence to the child who followed along
using a storyboard (Figure 1). The events portrayed are authentic in the sense of actually
having happened in one of the schools. It was a plausible event in the life-world of the
children being interviewed. What is important is that the episode evoked both a visceral
and a cognitive response. It provided children with the opportunity to project themselves
into a situation thereby revealing the guiding principles that shape their reactions and
responses. The choice of the particular episode of the school dress code was problematic
for the researchers. As always, there is the issue of whether a school situation can be
truly analogous of broader social and political issues, and there was the need for
something that could be addressed by children of widely varying ages (7 to 17). In the
Children’s Understanding of the Concept of Dissent
11
end, we committed to this particular episode because pilot-testing revealed that it would
engage students of all age levels, and second, because it showed that children were aware
of analogs with laws and government policies that can be the subject of dissenting
viewpoints within society.
Insert Figure 1 About Here
FINDINGS
Our analysis of the verbatim transcripts and the concept maps constructed for
individual children reveals a set of overlapping conceptual lenses through which the
children and young people in the study make sense of this particular episode. All of these
lenses or themes are present to a greater or lesser degree in the conceptions of children at
all grade levels except for the youngest children where a single perspective dominates.
We have labeled the themes deference, dialog and defiance. Each of the themes contains
sub-elements as outlined below. What the results show is that the children and young
people in this study construed the concept of dissent in a number of qualitatively distinct
ways; indeed, individual children were quite capable of employing varying, different and
sometimes competing conceptions of the concept at the same time.
Children’s Understanding of the Concept of Dissent
12
Insert Table 1 about here
Deference
The dominant reaction of the younger children to the ‘shorts’ episode can be
encapsulated in the concept of deference. Every single one of the seven year-olds (n =
16) indicated that they personally would have obeyed the school rule and that they felt it
was wrong for Cindy and Thomas not to do likewise. For them, the rules, and perhaps
more importantly, the school principal are to be obeyed – this they view as a matter of
respect. Indeed, for this group, respect manifests itself in an unquestioning obedience.
None of these predominantly seven year olds sought to question the legitimacy of neither
the rule itself nor the right of the school authorities to impose it. At the same time, they
attributed an innocent interpretation to the motives for Cindy’s and Thomas’s actions.
Interviewer:
Why do you think they wore shorts to school in the first place?
Various Students:
They were new kids and didn’t know that rule.
Their mom made them.
It was summer.
They had gym.
Children’s Understanding of the Concept of Dissent
13
Interviewer:
Why did they wear shorts again after being sent home?
Students:
Maybe they forgot. (Suggested by more than half of the students)
A few said that “maybe they didn’t like school and wanted to be sent home again.”
Several suggested that if anything like this ever happened to them they would tell their
mom (always mom, never dad or even parents). Certainly, none of the grade 2 students
saw the wearing of the shorts the second time as any sort of political statement; certainly,
it could in no way be construed as a matter of freedom of expression for the students. It
was not an act of dissent in the sense of the expression of a contrary viewpoint. If these
students feel any sense of concern or reservation about the school rule or the treatment of
the students involved, their dissenting feelings are suppressed within a framework
emphasizing obedience and respect.
The 11 year-olds also showed a highly deferential disposition in their
interpretation and assessment of the episode. They also would conform to the school rule
without challenging it in any way (13 out of 14 students) but their reasoning is somewhat
different from the seven year-olds.
Interviewer:
What would you have done if you were in the same situation?
Student:
Children’s Understanding of the Concept of Dissent
14
Ummm . . . I would have come back wearing pants like I was
supposed to.
Interviewer:
Why wouldn’t you break the rule?
Student:
Because I’m not one of those kids.
Interviewer:
Those kids?
Here emerged a typical line of thinking. The students inferred that Cindy and Thomas
were ‘bad’ kids – they were referred to as trouble-makers, inattentive, inclined to
fighting, swearing, shop-lifting – all somehow inferred from the episode with the shorts.
Furthermore, these 11 year-olds showed a fear of implications that extended well beyond
the episode itself. “Like, you’re in the principal’s office and he calls your parents and
you get in trouble at home.” Or, “you get a bad reputation; like you’re always breaking
the rules and doing drugs.” For these 11 year-olds, the result of the whole episode is that
“you get a hard time” from the principal, teachers and even parents. The best alternative
is to “just come back to school wearing jeans or something . . . [Why?] ‘Cause I didn’t
want to get into trouble again.” There is a surface compliance here; a deferential
disposition but it is a deference of expedience. The authority figures are to be obeyed not
because they are right but because the ensuing “hassle is not worth it.”
Children’s Understanding of the Concept of Dissent
15
Dialog
With just a few of the 11 year olds, there was a hint that that rule itself was
considered “stupid.” When probed about the meaning of stupid, students tended to
explain their conclusion in terms of the rule being “unfair.” But the concern was neither
strong nor pervasive. It was mentioned only by a few students and was not central to the
concerns expressed by those students. Even for the 13 year-olds, deference to authority
and obeying the rules was the accepted norm. Although students expressed the view that
the rule itself “sucks” or was “stupid” or was “not fair,” they indicated that they would
“go along with it.” But among this group there begins to emerge a sense that it is
legitimate to question authority, to question rules but only through acceptable means. For
these students, “acceptable means” require some measure of discussion. “They could
have talked the rule over with him . . . tried to convince him to change his mind . . . or
maybe they could have talked with their parents.” Some suggested that they could talk
with teachers or “write him a letter, or write to the school board.” None of the students
interviewed said that they could envisage themselves spray painting graffiti on the school
and they expressed disapproval of Cindy’s and Thomas’s actions though they could
sympathize with their actions: “They thought maybe . . . it would make him like realize
that the no shorts thing was really like . . . stupid or something.” They did it “to show the
way they feel.” “Because they were very angry.” “To make their point.” But several saw
the spray painting as an act of revenge “just to get back at him.” The spray painting was
Children’s Understanding of the Concept of Dissent
16
being “bad,” as was the wearing of the shorts in the first instance. “They were trying to
be disobedient,” “ . . . to be rebellious,” “just to be bad!”
While there is a strong theme of deference in the general reaction of the 13 yearolds, they do display a sense that rules can be unfair and that they may be challenged.
For most, though, there is a right way of challenging and this is through “dialog.”
Implicit in their talk seems to be the view that if only there is a reasonable dialog among
the interested parties, then there will inevitably be a mutually acceptable resolution of the
issue. There was no hint, however, of how to proceed if a resolution was not achieved.
These students are clearly aware of non-compliance and defiance but they are notions
with which they are not at all comfortable. They might contemplate them – “I would
think about it, but I wouldn’t do it.” There seems to be a latent sense of non-compliance
and/or defiance as just “not being the right thing to do.”
Defiance
The theme of defiance, in the sense of overt public disagreement with authority
emerges as an important theme only with the 17 year-olds. For these students, defiance
represents a legitimate avenue of expression, but only when discussion and dialog have
not achieved a satisfactory outcome. Unlike the younger children who see Cindy and
Thomas as bad and rebellious, this group describes them as “standing up for themselves,”
and “fighting for what they believed was right.” What was right was interpreted as rules
that “make sense” and “are applied equally.”
Children’s Understanding of the Concept of Dissent
17
“They figured, you know, maybe the dress code was being unfair. They
couldn’t see no reason why they weren’t allowed to wear shorts.”
And,
If their shorts were too short, it doesn’t make much sense ‘cause she has a skirt
and that’s just as short as their shorts.” (The ‘she’ here is the female student in
the first panel in Figure 1. The younger students had omitted any mention of her.)
For the 17 year-olds, the issues raised in the storyboard are neither frivolous nor
unreasonable.
The conception of dialog, for this group, is also somewhat more sophisticated.
Almost all of them see a discussion at the school level as the start of a process of
negotiation in which they are neither powerless nor helpless. The enlistment of the aid of
parents or teachers is not simply an upward delegation of responsibility as it might be for
the younger students. It is a clear recognition that “. . . adults get more response to
problems like that than kids would.” Furthermore, they show a belief that it would be
advantageous to act as part of a group. There is a sense that group solidarity lends a
measure of protection. One student explicitly mentioned that “there is power in
numbers” and another surmises “maybe if, not only them, but they got everybody in the
school to wear these shorts, then the principal is not going to suspend every person in the
whole school.”
In all of this, nevertheless, there is a generally deferential and respectful
disposition.
Children’s Understanding of the Concept of Dissent
18
It could be taken wrong that they came with shorts on in the first
place. Instead of just dropping in with the shorts on or whatever, they
should have gone to the principal and they knew it was a school rule so
they should have gone to him and talked about it first and seen what kind
of compromise he would have come up with. So, I guess they took the
wrong action first of all.
In their comments on what the students in the story might do, these 17 year-olds
explicitly referred to discussion, public meetings, letter writing to authorities and to the
media, posters and even walkouts. They showed an awareness of a range of measures:
legal and illegal, violent and non-violent. They were even able to identify situations in
their schools and elsewhere where they thought there had been an abuse of authority by
administrators and teachers. They could understand how others would be provoked to act
but did not see themselves as generally disposed to taking action – “I just can’t see
myself doing anything.”
Conclusion
The general representation of children’s and young people’s responses to this
single episode consists of themes of deference, dialog and defiance. Elements of all three
themes were found in the reactions of students at all age levels except for the youngest
children. What varied was the relative emphasis. With the younger children there was
clearly an emphasis upon unquestioning deference with just a whisper of the other
Children’s Understanding of the Concept of Dissent
19
themes. With the 11 and 13 year-olds there was a simplistic faith in dialog but within a
generally deferential framework. With the older adolescents there was an emerging sense
of a purposeful and strategic dialog, still deferential in orientation but with the possibility
of defiance to provide leverage in dispute resolution. The pattern is clearly one of
development from the naïve toward the more sophisticated. With the younger children
there was a relatively small number of elements at play in the situation, each one
minimally related to others in a sort of splendid isolation. With age, more elements inject
themselves into the situation, often interacting in complex ways; sometimes providing
contradictory and conflicting perspectives. Although implicit rather than explicit, the
students clearly confront competing values. There is reflection on the meaning of
respect, disagreement, fairness, personal security, harmonious relationships, even
violence against property and persons, and of course, which of them are to be accorded
precedence in real situations.
What is consequential in the findings is not the form of the reasoning, however; it
is, rather, in the identification of those aspects of understanding of the concept of dissent
that shape children’s and young people’s intellectual schemata: for younger children an
orientation that emphasizes respect and obedience; for younger adolescents a focus on
dialog and discussion; for older adolescents a faith in dialog but a recognition of the need
for mechanisms of reconciliation when dialog fails. In each instance, the prior
knowledge constitutes a platform from which teachers and students can launch a further
Children’s Understanding of the Concept of Dissent
20
exploration of the idea, assessing the legitimacy and efficacy not just of the theoretical
abstraction of dissent but of its concrete manifestations in real situations.
IMPLICATIONS FOR TEACHING AND LEARNING
If citizen participation in the democratic enterprise is construed, at least in part, as
the communication of consent and/or dissent, then the parameters of the concept
employed by the citizenry will shape the character of participation. The portrayal of
these parameters as dimensions of the cognitive schemata generated in this work helps
establish something of the terrain. Of course, the children’s schemata that we have
described constitute “naïve theories” in the sense conveyed by Torney-Purta (1991).
They are not fully developed as they might be in the literature of political philosophy or
even as they might be conceived by a thoughtful adult. They are, nevertheless, what the
students bring with them to the learning encounter. They constitute the children’s prior
knowledge. They represent the base upon which any future understanding must be
constructed.
In order to extend and refine, or perhaps reshape and reform, their conceptual
understandings, learners have to engage in an assessment of the adequacy of their current
intellectual schemata. Where there is a conception of dissent-as-deference, children need
to assess the core propositions of the position. Is it indeed the case that people who
challenge existing authority are simply “bad people,” that they are “just trouble-makers?”
And it should be done in the context of specific, concrete situations. In any country,
Children’s Understanding of the Concept of Dissent
21
children can examine their own national histories. Do they see the great reformers of
their societies as trouble-makers? Is this a reasonable way to construe Washington and
Jefferson? Or what about Fidel Castro or Ho Chi Minh? In what ways are they similar to
or different from the protesters and picketers who confronted political leaders at the
meetings of the World Trade Organization at the “Battle of Seattle” in 1999?
In the dissent-as-dialog orientation, children exude a strong faith in the power of
dialog. Can they assess whether such a faith is warranted? Does the history of the labor
movement or the women’s movement, Sakharov’s Soviet Union or Biko’s South Africa,
confirm or challenge their conceptions. Of course, in order to find out, students have to
learn the details of each of the cases that teachers suggest or select. They have to learn
“the facts.” The adequacy of their “concepts” is tested in the crucible of actual situations,
either vicarious or direct.
Where there is an image of dissent-as-defiance, children need to engage the ideas
of Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi, and also those of Jomo Kenyetta and
Nelson Mandela. They need to come face to face with Thoreau and to explore his claim
that from time to time it may be “. . . one’s duty to obey that ‘higher law’ and deliberately
violate the law of the land . . . even to the point of going to jail” (1967, p. 19). When
students suggest that “some issues are just not worth the hassle,” can they ask Burke
what he meant when he said that “the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for
good men to do nothing”?
Children’s Understanding of the Concept of Dissent
22
By identifying the major features in the terrain of children’s understanding of the
core ideas of democracy, we can help provide teachers and learners with a map from
which they might orient themselves, from which they can get their bearings. In the
findings reported here, we suggest that the major features on the landscape of the concept
of dissent among children and young people consist of deference, dialog and defiance,
often viewed in the naïve framework of children as discrete and competing alternatives
rather than as elements of a complementary and synergistic whole. Being aware of the
dimensions of children’s prior knowledge can help us, as teachers, to chart both the
starting points for new learning and the course ahead.
Children’s Understanding of the Concept of Dissent
23
REFERENCES
Ausubel, D. P. (1968) Educational psychology: a cognitive view. New York: Holt,
Rinehart and Winston.
Beetham, D. (1994) Defining and measuring democracy. London: Sage.
Bruce, C. (1994) Reflections on the experience of the phenomenographic interview.
In
Ballantyne, R.,& Bruce, C. Phenomenography: Philosophy and Practice.
Brisbane: Queensland University of Technology.
Byrnes, J.P., & Torney-Purta, J.V. (1995) Naïve theories and decision-making as part of
higher order thinking in social studies. Theory and Research in Social Education,
23 (3), 269-277.
DeCorte, E. (1990) Towards powerful learning environments for the acquisition of
problem-solving skills. European Journal of Psychology of Education, 5 (1), 519.
Dochy, F., Segers, M., & Buehl, M.M. (1999) The relation between assessment practices
and outcomes of studies: the case of research on prior knowledge. Review of
Educational Research, 68 (2), 145-186.
Gilbert, J.K., Osborne, R., & Fensham, P. (1982) Children’s science and its
consequences for teaching. Science Education, 66 (4), 623-633.
Greenstein, F.I., & Tarrow, S. (1970) Political orientations of children: the use of a
semi-projective technique in three nations. Beverly Hills: Sage.
Children’s Understanding of the Concept of Dissent
24
Hewson, P.W., & Hewson, M.G. (1989) Analysis and use of a task for identifying
conceptions of teaching science. Journal of Education for Teaching, 15 (3), 191209.
Hill, S. (1995) Early literacy and diversity. Australian Journal of Early Childhood, 20
(1), 23-27.
Kohlberg, L. (1981) The philosophy of moral development. San Francisco: Harper Row.
Leinhardt, G. (1992) What research tells us about teaching. Educational Leadership, 49
(7), 20-25.
Marton, F. (1988) Phenomenography: exploring different conceptions of reality. In
D.M. Fetterman (Ed.), Qualitative approaches to evaluation in education. New
York: Praeger.
Minstrell, J., & Hunt, E. (1991) The development of a classroom based teaching system
representing students’ knowledge structures and their processing of instruction.
In Duit, R., Goldberg, F., & Neidderer, H. (Eds.), Proceedings of the Bremen
International Workshop: Research in Physics Learning and Empirical Studies.
Kiel: IPM.
Newmann, F.M., Marks, H.M., & Gamoran, A. (1996) Authentic pedagogy and student
performance. American Journal of Education, 104 (4), 280-312.
Piaget, J. (1973) The moral judgment of the child. New York: Free Press. (Originally
published, 1932)
Rakow, S. (1992) Six steps to more meaning. Science Scope, 16 (2), 18-19.
Children’s Understanding of the Concept of Dissent
Riga, P.J. (1995) The nature of truth and dissent. American Journal of Jurisprudence,
40, 71-78.
Scott, J.C. (1985) Weapons of the weak: everyday forms of peasant resistance. New
Haven: Yale University Press.
Simon, J. (1996) Popular conceptions of democracy in post-communist Europe.
University of Strathclyde Studies in Public Policy No. 292.
Thoreau, H.D. As quoted by Harding, W. (1967) in an Introduction to The Variorum:
Civil Disobedience. New York: Twayne Publishers.
Torney-Purta, J.V. (1991) Schema theory and cognitive psychology: implications for
social studies. Theory and Research in Social Education, 19 (2), 189-210.
Turiel, E. (1983) The development of social knowledge: morality and convention.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
25
Children’s Understanding of the Concept of Dissent
26
Table 1
Children’s Understanding of the Concept of Dissent: Aspects of Awareness*
(in percentages)
Grade 2
(n=16)
7
Grade 6
(14)
11
Grade 8
(12)
13
Grade 12
(13)
17
1. Dissent-as-deference
 unquestioning obedience
 hollow compliance
 mindful compliance
100
0
100
57
8
92
0
15
0
0
0
15
2. Dissent-as-dialog
 seeking approval
 challenging unfairness
 negotiating a compromise
12
0
43
14
75
92
100
100
0
0
75
100
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
58
67
0
50
0
100
100
54
100
38
Grade:
Modal Age:
3. Dissent-as-defiance
 right of appeal
 legal recourse
 illegal recourse
 non-violent recourse
 violent recourse
This table shows children’s awareness of the ways in which dissent can manifest itself in
social situations. It is not a measure of the extent to which they might advocate, support
or condone such measures.