CHILDREN'S ACTIVISM AND THE SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT GOALS: EXPLORING DIGITAL POLITICAL ACTION AS PEDAGOGY IN DEVELOPMENT EDUCATION.

In the last decade, emerging digital technologies have created spaces for youth-led activism to flourish across the world. These spaces have facilitated civic engagement and bottom-up political participation from children and young people that are grounded in their specific interests and needs. Since the participatory practices granted by digital activism have been at the core of how younger generations are fighting for and advancing social change, it is essential for development education (DE) to explore the pedagogical possibilities of this particular type of participation. This article analyses youth-led mobilisations in Brazil connected to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and their corresponding social media activity as a way to explore digital activism experiences and practices. The mobilisation is the Brazilian school occupations under the hashtag #OccupaTudo and #EscolasEmLuta that address SDG 4 Quality Education. Through a digital ethnography that explores the social media discussions associated with this movement and what can be perceived as the lack of long term impact, the article demonstrates the relevance of political action as a pedagogy and a tool for teaching children and young people about their rights, how to uphold them and how to overcome existing barriers for their civic engagement and participation. Building upon Hannah Arendt's theory of action, the article proposes an approach to digital political action as pedagogy and not only as an expected outcome for development education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]