“Can I play?” An ethnographic study of children’s experiences of leadership and followership in primary school

Dixon, Mark (2025) “Can I play?” An ethnographic study of children’s experiences of leadership and followership in primary school. Doctoral thesis, Liverpool Hope University.

Text Mark Dixon EdD Thesis Resubmission 03112025.pdf - Submitted Version Available under License Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial. Download (15MB)

Abstract

This thesis investigates how leadership and followership are enacted, experienced, and understood by children within a primary school’s Forest School programme.
Drawing on two years of ethnographic fieldwork comprising thirty-nine naturalistic observations and thirty interviews, the study explores how children negotiate influence, collaboration, and belonging in outdoor, play-rich environments. Grounded in an interpretivist and constructivist framework, it challenges adult-centric models that conceptualise leadership as preparation for adulthood, arguing instead that Forest School provides a distinctive context in which children practise leadership and followership as dynamic, relational, and agentic phenomena shaped by social interaction, material engagement, and peer recognition.
Using Braun and Clarke’s (2006) thematic analysis, 139 initial codes were refined into five core themes - identity, relationships, collaboration, social influence, and role
fluidity - and subsequently synthesised into three higher-order principles: recognition, multimodality, and heterarchy. These principles reveal how the Forest School environment amplifies children’s agency, supports equitable participation, and enables influence to circulate reciprocally rather than hierarchically, reflecting a heterarchical form of social organisation grounded in fairness, responsiveness, and collective negotiation.
The study contributes to leadership studies by evidencing fairness-driven, distributed forms of influence rarely theorised in adult contexts, and to childhood studies by positioning leadership and followership as integral dimensions of peer culture. It further demonstrates how Forest School legitimises followership, broadens recognition of diverse expressions of influence, and models the equitable design of leader–follower relations. The thesis concludes by advancing child-centred conceptual and pedagogical frameworks of leadership and followership that reimagines influence as a reciprocal, generative process sustaining collaboration, agency, and belonging in children’s everyday social worlds.

Item Type:	Thesis (Doctoral)
Additional Information and Comments:	Copyright © The Author 2025. Original content in this thesis is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) Licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). Any third-party copyright material present remains the property of its respective owner(s) and is licensed under its existing terms. Access may initially be restricted at the author’s request.
Keywords:	Children’s leadership; Children’s followership; Peer culture; Childhood agency; Forest School; Outdoor learning; Primary education; Role fluidity; Relational influence; Childhood studies; Adult-centrism; Heterarchy; Recognition and belonging; Multimodality; Ethnography with children; Thematic analysis; Constructivist research; Interpretivist paradigm; Qualitative education research.
Faculty / Department:	Faculty of Education and Social Sciences > School of Education
SWORD Depositor:	RISE Symplectic
Depositing User:	RISE Symplectic
Date Deposited:	18 Nov 2025 11:01
Last Modified:	18 Nov 2025 11:01
URI:	https://hira.hope.ac.uk/id/eprint/4797

Actions (login required)

View Item