'Scrapbooks' as a resource in media research with young people

[About the book]: Visual media offer powerful communication opportunities. Doing Visual Research with Children and Young People explores the methodological, ethical, representational and theoretical issues surrounding image-based research with children and young people. It provides well-argued and illustrated resources to guide novice and experienced researchers through the challenges and benefits of visual research. Because new digital technologies have made it easier and cheaper to work with visual media, Pat Thomson brings together an international body of leading researchers who use a range of media to produce research data and communicate findings. Situating their discussions of visual research approaches within the context of actual research projects in communities and schools, and discussing a range of media from drawings, painting, collage and montages to film, video, photographs and new media, the book offers practical pointers for conducting research. These include: - why visual research is used - how to involve children and young people as co–researchers - complexities in analysis of images and the ethics of working visually - institutional difficulties that can arise when working with a 'visual voice' - how to manage resources in research projects Doing Visual Research with Children and Young People will be an ideal guide for researchers both at undergraduate and postgraduate level across disciplines, including education, youth and social work, health and nursing, criminology and community studies. It will also act as an up-to-date resource on this rapidly changing approach for practitioners working in the field

Doing it differently: youth leadership and the arts in a creative learning programme

Notions of youth ‘leadership’, partnership or collaborating with young people as ‘service users’, are currently being endorsed and elaborated across a very broad spectrum of thinking, policymaking and provision. This paper argues that if we want to understand this phenomenon, we should not look in the first instance to young people as the prime source of commentary or agency: instead, we need to understand it as a way of ‘doing’ – in this instance - the arts or education differently. The paper draws on research into how one organization, the flagship English ‘creative learning’ programme Creative Partnerships run in schools between 2002 and 2011, attempted to ‘put young people at the heart’ of its work. It argues that youth leadership should be analysed as it is enacted within and through specific sites and practices, and in terms of the subjectivities, capacities and narratives it offers to teachers, students, artists and others involved. The result is a more ambivalent account of participatory approaches, acknowledging their dilemmas as well as their achievements, and observing that they reconfigure power relations in sometimes unexpected, and sometimes all-too-familiar, ways

Youth Voice in the work of Creative Partnerships

This report summarises the findings of an 18-month research project into ‘Youth Voice in the work of Creative Partnerships ‘, 2007-9, conducted by Sara Bragg, Helen Manchester, Dorothy Faulkner at the Open University, funded by the Arts Council England. Creative Partnerships (CP) was established in 2002 and is a ‘flagship creative learning programme’. It aims to foster innovative, long term collaborations between schools (often in areas of socio-economic deprivation) and creative practitioners. In particular CP states that it places young people ‘at the heart of what we do’ and claims that its programmes are most effective when young people are actively involved in leading and shaping them. CP highlights three key areas: involving young people in governance (the design, delivery and evaluation of the programme of work); building and maintaining ‘positive relationships’ with young people; working as ‘co-constructors of learning’ with them. The report maps existing youth voice initiatives in Creative Partnerships in those three areas. In addition, it considers the nature of the links between creativity and participation; explores issues of access to youth voice, such as patterns of inclusion and exclusion; explores what skills, experiences, identities and relationships are developed through participation. More broadly it attempts to understand, analyse and theorise youth voice, starting from the empirical but aiming to interpret the features of particular activities or projects to understand them more fully

A logic of care in / of / for voice: tuning-in, enacting and assembling in student voice practices and education

The present moment is beset by many complex challenges. Young people face living with the consequences of decisions being made largely without their consent or involvement. Centering youth voices may be part of the solution. But we need to go beyond liberal, individualist and rights-based models that pay insufficient attention to the enabling conditions of meaningful voice, to temporalities, or to schooling as institution and process. Seeking alternative conceptualizations of voice, this paper draws on Annemarie Mol’s work on the ‘logic of care’ in relation to health services. She describes this as a ceaseless, ongoing, mutual process of attunement to the unpredictable nature of human existence, implicating a range of actors, technologies, resources, materials, meanings, and affects. This description better captures aspects of good – responsive – educational practice. It also resonates with recent feminist scholarship on the posthuman, new materialist and affective dimensions of everyday life and education. This can support innovative work related to youth voice, as exemplified by a research project aiming to ‘attune, animate and amplify’ what matters to young people in learning about sexuality. Such reconceptualizations may help us meet the challenges we face, not only in schools but those of life on a finite planet

Perspectives on 'Choice and Challenge' in primary schools

This article discusses ‘Choice and Challenge’ as a tool for school improvement and as a ‘practicable pedagogy’ that attempts to embody the principles of ‘learning without limits’, rejecting ability grouping and labelling. As considered here, ‘Choice and Challenge’ emerges specifically from practice at the Wroxham School, led by Alison Peacock, which is the subject of the books Creating Learning Without Limits and Assessment for Learning Without Limits. The approach involves teachers providing children with a range of option set at different levels of ‘challenge’ and allowing them to work through the activities themselves, in dialogue with teachers and peers. It aims to motivate children in more enabling ways than grades and ranking, facilitating children’s own reflection on and awareness of themselves as learners in a collaborative and non-competitive environment. It can be seen as inducing change by giving educators a ‘hook’ that delivers positive classroom experiences and thereby encourages openness to the broader philosophy and values on which it rests. The small-scale research project reported on here investigated the implementation of the approach in six primary schools around England. It aims to illuminate some of the issues encountered in doing so, thus stimulating reflection by those wishing to adopt similar approaches to improve schools and enhance social justice. </jats:p

Consulting Young People: a literature review

(From the Foreword by series editors) This literature review highlights why young learners should be listened to, and explains how to go about it to generate genuine dialogue and collaboration. It was originally published in 2007, by the Creative Partnerships team at Arts Council England. The programme and team have since been transferred to a new organisation, Creativity, Culture and Education (CCE) and, the report is now being republished in the new CCE format. In this second edition, Sara Bragg has taken the opportunity to update some of the details and references from the first edition including adding examples from her more recent research with the Open University into youth voice work in Creative Partnerships (Bragg, Manchester and Faulkner, 2009). This review surveys the literature analysing how and why young people can or should be consulted. It is especially relevant to the broader ambitions of CCE because consulting young people and encouraging their participation is important to our work. We need to hear young people’s views about what we do, and we need to find ways to draw on their creativity and insights, to maintain our programmes’ dynamism and sustainability. However, this will not just happen – it needs to be thought about and structured carefully to ensure that we listen to a range of voices, not just the loudest, or those that fit our own existing agendas. The methods and methodologies for consulting with, and gathering the views of, young people are surveyed in this report. Its main message is that consulting young people is not a simple or straightforward process and that we need to consider carefully how best to learn about and interpret their views and opinions. We hope that the report will be useful for those interested in consulting young people. Above all, we believe this report highlights some of the reasons why young learners should be listened to, and explains how to go about it in a way that unleashes their creativity and generates genuine dialogue and collaboration

Pedagogies of student voice

Whilst its precise definition varies, the concept of ‘student voice’ is endorsed and elaborated across a very broad spectrum of contemporary educational thinking, policymaking and provision. But if the popularity and near-ubiquity of voice now confound attempts to designate it as inherently emancipatory, a covert strategy of neoliberalism, or any other single ‘thing’, they also require careful, situated interpretation. The paper draws on research into how one organization – the flagship English ‘creative learning’ programme Creative Partnerships - attempted to ‘put young people at the heart’ of its work. It argues that voice should be understood as enacted within and through specific sites and practices, and in terms of the subjectivities and narratives it offers to teachers, students, artists and others involved. The contexts and embodied social positions through which students experience and negotiate voicing processes can, however, generate ambivalent effects and reconfigure power relations in schools in unexpected ways

Researching everyday childhoods: time, technology and documentation in a digital age

How can we know about children’s everyday lives in a digitally saturated world? What is it like to grow up in and through new media? What happens between the ages of 7 and 15 and does it make sense to think of maturation as mediated? These questions are explored in this innovative book, which synthesizes empirical documentation of children’s everyday lives with discussions of key theoretical and methodological concepts to provide a unique guide to researching childhood and youth. Researching Everyday Childhoods begins by asking what recent ‘post-empirical’ and ‘post-digital’ frameworks can offer researchers of children and young people’s lives, particularly in researching and theorising how the digital remakes childhood and youth. The key ideas of time, technology and documentation are then introduced and are woven throughout the book’s chapters. Research-led, the book is informed by two state of the art empirical studies – ‘Face 2 Face’ and ‘Curating Childhoods’ – and links to a dynamic multimedia archive generated by the studies