Description
This captivating book provides a detailed examination of school participatory budgeting (SPB), a democratic process that combines citizenship education, civic engagement and participatory governance. Presenting insights from SPB processes across the globe, it advocates for the wider rollout of programs which amplify students’ voices, their deliberative capacities and decision-making power while improving school climate and campus infrastructure.Daniel Schugurensky and Tara Bartlett bring together an international range of practitioners and researchers to analyse the main accomplishments, challenges and lessons learned through the design, implementation, and evaluation of SPB. Chapter authors highlight how SPB is gaining traction and how national and local contexts can explain similarities and differences. The book contends that SPB is a form of student-centred pedagogy that nurtures student autonomy and agency and democratic and inclusive institutional practices.This book is an essential tool for teachers, educational leaders, and scholars from social sciences and related fields interested in implementing SPB and evaluating its impact.Review Quote‘With democracy under attack world-wide, this book could not come at a better time. Civic education has long been seen as a means for restoring commitments to democratic institutions, but when it comes to civic engagement, boosting political participation has always been a difficult nut to crack. Enter school-based participatory budgeting. As an approach to democratic renewal, the power of PB is well-known. As a pedagogy, it holds particular promise. This book offers a much-needed roadmap with dozens of practical how-to examples. Teachers, principals, academics, and policymakers who want to know what school participatory budgeting is and how it can help strengthen democracy should all read this gem of a book.’Review Quote‘Democracy is a highly contested, nebulous and contentious concept. Everyone wants it but we are often focused on, and frustrated by, normative elections as the way to get there, and those elections are fraught with problems, including, ironically, not building a critically-engaged democracy. In Educating for Democracy: The Case for Participatory Budgeting in Schools, Daniel Schugurensky and Tara Bartlett have pulled together a wonderful group of international scholars to highlight the process of building democracy, within citizens, schools and communities. While important, the end-point is not as fundamental as the process, and this book provides significant insight into how participatory budgeting can help us create more engaged and democratic societies. This book can help us start to rethink citizenship education at the local level.’Biographical NoteEdited by Daniel Schugurensky, Director, Participatory Governance Initiative, Professor at School of Public Affairs and School of Social Transformation. Arizona State University and Tara Bartlett, Senior Research Analyst, Participatory Governance Initiative, School of Public Affairs, Arizona State University, US
