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This paper reports on empirical research on youth as active citizens in Senegal with specific reference to their education and their sexual and reproductive health rights. In a context of postcoloniality which claims to have privileged secular, republican understandings of the constitution, the authors seek to illuminate how youth activists sustain patriarchal, metropolitan views of citizenship and reinforce ethnic and locational (urban/rural) hierarchies. Their analysis is based on a case study of active youth citizenship, as reflected in youth engagement in the recent presidential elections in Senegal. This included involvement in youth protests against pre-election constitutional abuse and in a project monitoring the subsequent elections using digital technologies. The authors compare how youth activists enacted different notions of citizenship, in some instances involving a vigorous defence of Senegal's democratic constitution, while in others dismissing this as being irrelevant to youth concerns. Here the authors make an analytic distinction between youth engagement in politics, seen as the public sphere of constitutional democracy, and the political, which they relate to the inherently conflictual and agonistic processes through which (youth) identities are policed, in ways which may legitimate or marginalise. Despite the frequent construction of youth as being agents of change, this analysis shows how potentially productive and open spaces for active citizenship were drawn towards conformity and the reproduction of existing hegemonies, in particular through patriarchal gender relations and sexual norms within which female youth remained particularly vulnerable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The positioning of theory in relation to educational practice has provoked much recent debate, with some arguing that educational theory constrains thinking in education, while others dismiss 'theory' out of hand as belonging to the world of the 'academic', abstracted from the 'realities' of the classroom. This paper views theory as necessarily implicated in all practices, but argues that depending on the theories embraced, and the understanding of theory itself, education can be understood in very different ways. Resisting the separation of theory from practice, the paper takes up the call to consider the entanglement of theory with practice, or how theory matters. It takes formative assessment as a particularly fertile case for this discussion. Formative assessment has been considerably developed in schooling across different national education systems. Its aspiration is for assessment to support learning, rather than only to credentialise learning. Having first emerged as a concept when behaviourism held sway, it has been considered through different theoretical lenses. Drawing upon empirical studies of classroom assessment practices, the paper draws out the different 'mattering' implicated in the different languages of assessment used by practitioners, raising questions about the practices this produced. The paper concludes by asking if formative assessment could become 'educational' in a more radical sense, if opportunities to focus on the contingencies and politics of our meaning-making were sometimes taken up more openly and dialogically with students, as opposed to formative assessment sitting in a instrumental relationship to a given curriculum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]