The expansion of the research into children’s rights during the last 20 years has constituted children’s rights research as an established and legitimate field of study. The time may now be ripe to reflect on the work undertaken so far and to consider the future of children’s rights research. In recent years, self-critical voices have surfaced within the research field, pointing out possible areas of concern. The ambition of this paper is to contribute to such deliberations within children’s rights research. In the paper, comments and concerns that have been put forward are brought together and developed further, leading to the suggestion that research into children’s rights issues will need to address three major challenges on the way forward: advancing critique, increasing theorisation and contextualising research.

This paper aims to explore and develop a theoretical approach for children's rights research in education formed through an encounter between the sociology of childhood and John Dewey's educational theory. The interest is mainly methodological, in the sense that the primary ambition of the investigation is to suggest a fruitful and useful theoretical base for formulating research problems and undertaking research in children's rights in education. The paper argues that, particularly in educational settings, research into children's rights can and must be attributed to children both as full-status humans in a socio-politically contextual present, and as continually growing and changing, immature and dependent humans. From the theoretical encounter suggested in the paper, the much-used distinction of the child as either 'being' or 'becoming' can be reconsidered, and another point of departure for the study of children's rights issues in education can be discerned.

This paper presents a research synthesis that aims to clarify and discuss how children's rights in education are constructed in research. A basic assumption is accordingly that research is an important participant in the process in which principal meanings and essential aspects of children's rights take shape. In the synthesis, 35 research publications, published between 1997-2008, have been selected and analysed. The main findings show that the research interest centres on four main themes: 1) Human rights orientation, 2) Education difficult to change, 3) Children's participation rights, and 4) Children's rights – parents' rights. In research, essential aspects of education are highlighted as matters of children's rights and the research construction give rise to some important insights that call for further research on children's rights in education.

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In this paper, the widespread use of the "3 p's", provision, protection and participation, to categorise children's rights is critically examined. This conceptualisation is argued to have hampering effects on research in children's rights, in that it frames the research in a problematic way and hinders the possibilities of attaining theoretically driven analyses. In the paper, the emergence and use of the 3 p's is first traced and discussed. Thereafter, an alternative language for constructing and analysing children's rights is proposed, namely the vocabulary used for general human rights: civil, political and social rights. When children's rights are placed within the development of human rights and conceptualised accordingly, a different understanding of the content of children's rights surfaces. The theoretical contextualisation that is then added is suggested as a way of approaching contradictions and conflicts surrounding children's rights issues with more theoretical depth and nuances.