Chapter 6
. Activities 1

Chapter 6 investigates the interactions between adults and children/adolescents in villages and summer camps, considering if and in which ways adults’ actions promote children/adolescents’ participation and involvement in decision-making. The analysis reveals that in villages, communication processes between children and adults are primarily structured as educational disempowering monologues, while a systematic promotion of children’s participation seems difficult to achieve, and ambivalences and oscillations are recurrent in interactions. In summer camps, where disempowering monologues and ambivalences are less frequently produced than in villages, a variety of adults’ dialogic actions succeeds in promoting and supporting adolescents’ self-expression and active participation, but it frequently fails to create effective coordination among adolescents’ contributions, chiefly promoting communication between adults and adolescents.