Conference Program

Over the past two decades, student participation has gained prominence in educational research and is widely recognised as a key condition for promoting school democracy, youth agency, and civic development (Sousa & Ferreira, 2024). The literature highlights the positive impacts of valuing students’ voices on their holistic development, the improvement of educational relationships, and the functioning of school institutions, with benefits extending to teachers and the school community (Biddle, 2019; Cook-Sather, 2020; Geurts et al., 2024).

Within the European context of decentralisation and strengthened school autonomy, school governing bodies stand out as formal spaces for student participation in democratic governance. They bring together different educational actors, yet vary in their degree of formalisation, competences, and decision-making power, depending on political and social contexts (OECD, 2024).

Persistent ambiguities in the implementation of student participation within school decision-making bodies are identified: representation tends to be restricted to secondary students; power remains centralised in principals and teachers; and there are limitations to the deliberative potential of collegial bodies, as these are often reduced to formal or symbolic dynamics (Andersson, 2019; Elemen, 2015; Kaba, 2001).

In this context, this communication presents a literature review examining how recent research has conceptualised and problematised student participation in formal school governance bodies, as well as the proposals that have emerged for consolidating it as an effective democratic practice. The review maps the literature and synthesizes the recommendations put forward by these studies, addressing the need to deepen knowledge on effective forms of student participation (Mager & Nowak, 2012).

Publications from 2010 onwards were selected from journals indexed in Scopus, Web of Science, and ERIC to ensure an international perspective. The Portuguese Open Access Scientific Repository network (RCAAP) was also considered to include national and local contexts. Publications in English, Portuguese, and Spanish were included, covering empirical and theoretical studies on student participation in formal school governance bodies, with explicit attention to decision-making processes. The analysis is based on a critical and comparative reading, combining thematic coding and categorisation with strategies of connection (Maxwell, 2009) to identify conceptual patterns, analytical tensions, and recurring limitations in the enactment of student participation.

The results contribute to rethink the current design of school decision-making spaces. These are understood as social spaces of democratic governance, where power relations emerge and are contested (Sarmento et al., 2007), and from which it is possible to question the school form (Vincent et al., 2001). It starts from the assumption that “participatory devices” (Sarmento et al., 2007) hold the potential to counteract the rigidity of a school structure historically oriented towards control and conformity (Lima & Afonso, 1990).

The aim is to understand how spaces of silence can be transformed into spaces of voice, moving beyond symbolic representation and enabling forms of effective student participation, thereby contributing to the panel’s central question: can schools become a site of democratic renewal, and under what pedagogical, organisational and relational conditions?