(SCY3) Redesigning futures with children and for children

How does design in our work with children, in areas such as research, practice and policy, bring about particular ways of being and doing? How does design shape research carried out with children, e.g. in terms of methods, methodology, participation, and knowledge mobilization? How do conceptualizations of childhood shape the design of spaces where children and youth spend their daily lives? How can design create particular life worlds for some children and their families while excluding others? This session includes researchers, educators, and other professionals who work with children and will share their ideas, knowledge and experiences from research and/or practice to contribute to discussions that rethink, refocus and reshape the future for children through a focus on design. Design within this context can be understood as an intentional plan aimed at a particular result. This session will provide space for reflecting on and sharing our work with children while engaging with larger questions around design and exploring the impact of design on children’s past, present and future lives. These reflections can lead us to exploring and considering our own role as childhood scholars and the ways we are collectively responsible for designing the field of childhood studies. As Spyrou (2022) states, “A critical engagement with design might offer childhood studies not just a new conceptual area for innovative theoretical and methodological work but also more fertile ground for exploring its own design practices and their effects on research work with children.” (p.471). Tags: Enfants Et Jeunes, Méthodes De Recherche

Organizer: Laurel Donison, Brock University; Chair: Laurel Donison, Brock University

Presentations

Mehdia Hassan, University of Toronto

Collective insights from making visual narratives of collage: Embracing enabling research methods with Afghan youth in Toronto neighbourhoods

The art form of collage allows young people to build bridges across differences, fostering knowledge sharing and meaningful discussions about the co-existence of multiple perspectives (Anzaldua, 2002; Sameshima et al., 2019). In some ways, the process of collage-making also mimics the process of narrative-making, which helps youth participants better conceptualise how to coherently string together different lived experiences. Collage-making allows young people to accessibly assemble, reconfigure, and build new relationships between various lived experiences because it permits the layers of important themes, ideas, and patterns to relationally emerge from the collective dialogues and reflections (Sameshima et al., 2019; Davis, 2008). It also encourages critical self-reflection, collaborative dialogue, and visual storytelling in non-linear ways, across temporalities and spaces (Davis, 2008). Understandings and experiences of space are action-based, through embodiments, as hands are used to tear, rearrange, cut, and paste items for the collage (Roberts, 2018). Furthermore, collage, as a critical reflexive tool, supports a directed collaboration approach in research with youth, as it enables young people to have direct control over how they express and present their narratives (Freeman and Mathison, 2008; Farmer, 2022). Therefore, collage can be seen as an “enabling method,” since it allows youth to engage in research meaningfully and equitably, as young people’s worldviews have been rarely acknowledged in their education (Farmer and Cepin, 2017). In this paper, I demonstrate how making visual narratives of collage with Afghan youth in Toronto served as an enabling research method, through the various transformative impacts it has had on how youth participants see themselves as learners, artists, and co-researchers, in my doctoral fieldwork.. As a community arts facilitator for the past decade, with a background in visual arts, I drew from my artistic skills gained from my creative practice and experience with community-engaged research to facilitate a series of three 90-minute collage-making sessions with Afghan youth across the Toronto neighbourhoods of Rexdale, Scarborough, and Thorncliffe Park. Participants produced original collages that responded to how they saw themselves as learners outside of the school classroom; this was followed by three 90-minute focus groups, where participants shared their collages and learning experiences with each other. I also share collective insights of the process of collage-making, including how Afghan youth participants found the creative process to be transformative for them. The collage-making sessions fostered a more equitable research environment for meaningful dialogue and the co-production of knowledge, contributing to decreasing power dynamics between the researcher and the Afghan youth participants (Sameshima et al., 2019). Collage allowed for democratic engagement with Afghan youth, who may not necessarily identify as “artists,” and decreased their anxiety towards art-making, since it is a medium that everyone can engage in, regardless of artistic skill level (Butler-Kisber and Poldma, 2010; Gaztambide-Fernandez, 2013). Afghan youth participants were able to express and evoke memories of verbally inarticulate emotions and feelings that they had not realized before, emerging from various “A-ha” moments from collective discussions on their learning experiences (Davis, 2008). Through the act of collage-making, as an enabling research method, youth participants are remaking their own belonging and relationships to their everyday spaces by repurposing what is already there (Roberts, 2018; Farmer, 2022). While it is never guaranteed, the possibility of social justice transformation through the creative arts still exists and is shaped by the various social contexts in which the arts are produced (Gaztambide-Fernandez, 2013; Anzaldua, 2002).  

Stephanie Fearon, York University

This is Mica's World: Engaging Black Canadian Girls in Power-Conscious Collaborative Research

Canada boasts a diverse and longstanding Black population. The country’s relationship with Black Canadian communities is marred by practices of enslavement and segregation, and racially restrictive immigration policies (Aladejebi, 2021; Maynard, 2017). Black scholars point to the ways that Atlantic chattel slavery and its afterlives continue to unfold in Canadian institutions like education (Brand, 2020; Maynard, 2017; Walcott Abdillahi, 2019). In these afterlives, anti-Black racism is endemic to Canadian public schools and profoundly shapes the lives of Black children (Walcott and Abdillahi, 2019; Maynard, 2017). A growing number of Black scholars and community members uphold the collection of race-based data as an integral component to disrupting and dismantling the hate and violence wielded against Black children in Canadian schools (Walcott, 2020). Indeed, empirical inquiries on Black life are vital to establishing policies, practices, and pedagogies for the wellbeing and academic achievement of Black Canadian children. University-based researchers have long been at the helm in developing and facilitating empirical inquiries on Black Canadian communities. However, Black Canadians’ relationships with academic institutions are fraught and tenuous (Walcott, 2020). Black people have long denounced research emanating from these institutions as extractive and exploitative. Black Canadians decry the power hierarchies and oppressive discourses inherent in Eurocentric research processes (Fearon, 2023). In fact, Black leaders accuse these empirical inquiries as benefiting the researchers collecting the data more than the Black people being researched (Walcott, 2020). In this arts-informed autoethnography, I investigate my own practice as a University professor with a research profile focused on the experiences of Black Canadian women and girls in schools. I am particularly interested in the ways that I use an endarkened feminist epistemology and the arts to shift the power imbued in my researchers identity to the Black girls with whom I collaborate. In so doing, I imagine and advance a power-conscious inquiry process that is useful for researchers wishing to embrace a collaborative ethic grounded in Black onto-epistemologies when working with Black girls. Specifically, I explore the ways that I create conditions whereby I, the researcher, can be cognizant of power relations and disrupt the prevalent researcher/researched dichotomy and more deeply invite Black girls to become collaborators and share power within the inquiry (Stewart, 2022). The following questions guide my autoethnography: How might educational researchers imagine and develop a power-conscious collaborative inquiry process with Black girls? How might this process attend to and disrupt the prevalent researcher/researched dichotomy? How might this inquiry process shift the power imbued in a researcher’s identity to Black girls? I begin this paper by providing a critique on power and its manifestations in Eurocentric forms of inquiry. I, then, present the tenets of a power-conscious framework grounded in an endarkened feminist epistemology (Stewart, 2022). Through a creative non-fiction short story, I showcase how I partnered with three Black Canadian girls to reconceptualize their role in the research process. Centering my work with Mica, a 10-year-old Black girl in a special education program, I highlight my research journey to embracing a collaborative ethic. To this end, with humility, I showcase the shortcomings and successes I faced when working with Black girls in a power-conscious collaborative inquiry. The paper concludes with a series of reflective questions challenging scholars to engage in power-conscious research processes with Black girls. 

Laurel Donison, Brock University

Thinking critically about the design and (re)design of an outdoor play space at a child care center grounded in new materialism theory.

The design of outdoor play spaces in child care centers can create particular ways of doing and being which impact children’s play. On one hand the design of spaces may exclude children from certain aspects of the world, however on the other hand children may shape these spaces by their own ways of being and knowing (Spyrou, 2022). The design of children’s outdoor spaces often created by adults can be informed by beliefs and theories about childhood that can implicate children’s worlds (Spyrou, 2022). In early childhood education this includes approaches that are child-centered (Taylor and Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2018) and often do not focus on the relationality of children’s lives, including the connections and networks with other human and more-than-humans (Spyrou, 2018). In this presentation I draw on my PhD research project at an early childhood education center that focused on children’s daily outdoor play experiences and their perspectives. Grounded in new materialism I “draw attention to the way all matter, human and nonhuman, is agential” (Merewether, 2019, p.106). Following scholars who have highlighted the agency of environments, natural elements and materials within outdoor spaces (see Rautio and Jokinen, 2016; Anggard,2016; Merewether, 2019), I explore the design of the outdoor play space where I did my research. I focus on the way the design shaped children’s daily experiences and also how the children’s relations with the more-than-human world contributed to the design of the outdoor play space. I explore the ways the children (re)designed the outdoor space through their play and discuss how the more-than-human world became entangled in the design. For example, the impact of the seasons and weather on the play space. I also share the ways the children-built connections with snails and ducks through a fence, how they collected water for their play through a drain pipe, their play with puddles and the way the climbing structures became different places for their play. Exploring the ways the children transformed the outdoor space through their play can inform educators, architects and other adults who work with children about the importance of co-designing spaces for children with children. Further it can inspire other individuals to reflect on the way design works and the impacts it has on children’s lives, especially in education settings where they spend a large amount of their awake hours. Using new materialism theory will add to these discussions on design because it draws attention to the complex entangled experiences that emerge in outdoor spaces. Such Engagements with new-materialist theoretical approaches can offer us an understanding of Early Childhood Education and Care that is always relational and interconnected. These theories can move us beyond the limits of approaches that focus only on Developmentally Appropriate Practice (DAP), individual agency and ontologies of separation (Taylor et al, 2012; Spyrou, 2022), all of which have influenced the design of outdoor of play spaces in the past.

Julie Garlen, Carleton University; Sarah Hembruff, Carleton University

Redesigning Research with Children and for Children: Participatory Arts-Based Research as Agentic Design

This paper examines how a methodology that we chose to call “child participatory action research” (CPAR) failed as the emancipatory project that we envisioned for a grant-funded initiative entitled “girls in the digital world” (GDW). We, the principal investigator/ faculty lead and the graduate research assistant who was involved with the project from its inception, discuss lessons learned from our failed attempt to break down adult-child power dynamics when facilitating CPAR. The GDW research project highlighted the impossibility of working with children in a way that does not centre an adult agenda. Here, we discuss the implications of these failures for the future design of research with children and how these insights might guide us in moving towards shared spaces and a future with children that involves centering their voices and lived experiences through participatory arts-based research. We describe how the lessons we learned shaped the design of a new research-creation project that invites children to write and publish their own picture books. The impetus for the research project itself as well as the critique that we undertake here was our own interest in better understanding the challenges of and possibilities for adult allyship with children. The notion of adult allyship emerges from a school of thought associated with the new social study of childhood, from which the interdisciplinary field of childhood studies emerged. However, traditional constructions of children’s agency within childhood studies have tended “to treat children’s agency in a celebratory, uncritical, a-theoretical, non-relational, locally-bound and non-reflective manner” that disregard the complexity of their lived experiences and realities (Huijsmans 2011, 1308). Such limitations speak to the need for ‘a wider critical and analytical debate about the theories, methods and practices of intersectionality within the childhood studies field’ (Konstantoni and Emejulu 2017, 8), which would place greater emphasis on local context and adult–child relations and draw attention to the ways that age functions in relation to other forms of marginalization. The motivation to develop GDW as what we hoped would be an “emancipatory” project stemmed from a desire to explore the ways that adultism limits children’s participation and agency. For the initial project that we are critiquing here, we looked to participatory action research (par) as an ideal methodology for inviting young people to collaboratively engage in the work of building a more equitable digital world. The par paradigm starts with “the understanding that people—especially those who have experienced historic oppression—hold deep knowledge about their lives and experiences, and should help shape the questions, [and] frame the interpretations” of research (Fine and Torre, 2006, p. 458). Par is both an investigation and an intervention that is meant to empower participants to enact positive social change. The new initiative that grew out of our methodological failure is a participatory arts-based research project, which we suggest holds greater potential for research with children that resists the extractive, adultist aspects of par that we outline in this paper.