|
|
Young people as researchers
By Ben Williamson, Learning Researcher, Futurelab |
A growing number of educators and academic researchers in the last few years have begun to speak of developing young people's abilities to work and act as researchers. But what does being a 'researcher' mean in this context?
The underlying theory behind this interest stems in part from the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which places in law the rights of children and young people to be consulted and informed, in accordance with their maturity, about matters that affect their lives.
It also chimes with a recent discourse of child participation arising mainly from the charity sector and with the sociology of childhood, as well as with educational policy on the provision of citizenship education. According to a DfES recommendation, from September 2004 all young people should be consulted by their teachers about the scope of the issues covered in citizenship lessons.
When educators and academics speak of children and young people as researchers, however, they usually have something more radical in mind than consulting the children in their care about the issues they would like to be taught to understand better. They usually have in mind the very transformation of the relationships between schools and the young people who attend them.
Priscilla Alderson from the Institute of Education at London University believes that training young people to become researchers has the potential to address power imbalances.
"Respect for children's participation recognises them as subjects rather than objects of research, who 'speak' in their own right and report valid views and experiences," she writes in an article on the subject. "To involve children more directly in research can rescue them from silence and exclusion, and from being represented, by default, as passive objects."1
The kinds of research that children can do, she adds, are almost limitless as long as they have been appropriately trained and have access to supportive staff.
"Child researchers use a wide variety of methods, from selecting topics, questions, samples and observation sites through data collection to analysis and reporting, dissemination and policy discussions. Research reports by young groups range from long typed reports to a simple poster or a wall newspaper, a video or photographic exhibition."
At the Centre for Childhood, Development and Learning at the Open University, academics have formed an initiative aimed at providing research training for children through lunchtime 'research clubs' at their schools.
The Children's Research Centre was set up on the understanding that children are experts on their own lives, that children's views on matters important to them are valuable, and that research by children can contribute to important new understandings by teachers and academics about childhood itself. The centre now works with numerous schools and outreach programmes, and has generated a book providing a step-by-step guide for others wishing to provide similar training2.
Much of this work, to date, is broadly in the domain of social science studies, so that children are being trained in the skills and values of social scientists. This is perhaps inevitable, given that the interest has arisen directly from the social sciences. However, some academics have sounded a few notes of caution to those who believe that training children as researchers is automatically insightful and liberating.
According to Sussex University's Michael Fielding, one of the UK's leading figures in this field, work with children as researchers asserts their right to have their voices heard, recognised, and acted upon, but unless the relationships between teachers and children are understood as a mutual partnership, there is little chance of accomplishing renewal in children's schools, communities, and social lives.
In a recent article3 Fielding argues that children do need to be trained in the skills and values of research in order to identify issues for exploration, to shape the subject, pace and pattern of the study, and conduct and report their analysis, and this, he says, needs to be accomplished between children and teachers working together.
"The potential for transformation is more likely to reside in arrangements which require the active engagement of students and teachers working in partnership," he argues. "Initiatives that either exclude teachers or seek to engage them in less than central ways, often late in the process. are unlikely to have anything other than limited success and stand little chance of sustainability, let alone transformation."
Therefore, academic research on children as researchers must involve teachers if children's results are to be valued and acted upon at all. Further, the relationship should not be seen simply as a one-way interaction where children present their work to teachers, but an ongoing dialogue through which teachers and young learners might come to better understandings together.
That also includes children learning about the processes of how to go about collecting and analysing data purposefully to come to new understandings, and teachers gaining insights that can contribute to their own professional development.
Michael Fielding adds that recognising the differing standpoints of children and adults is also important. "Students tend to see the world of the school differently to the way adults see it and, even if they identify similar issues as being of particular importance, invariably they will have different understandings of their nature and significance. Staff enable the practical realisation of the research and support the development of the skills and dispositions of individual and group learning."
Although there remain significant barriers to realising the ideal of children and teachers working together on equal terms on research projects, such as timetables, league tables and other school structures, there is a proliferation of initiatives and literature on children as researchers. Much of this work recognises the importance of taking young people's views into account when considering renewal in our schools. And as one young researcher argues in a recent book4 on the subject, "Education is for students and therefore students should have a say in it."
Notes and links
1. Alderson, P (2001). Research by children. International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 4(2), 139-153
2. Kellett, M (2005). How to Develop Children as Researchers: Step by Step Guidance to Teaching the Research Process. Sage Publishing
3. Fielding, M (2004). Transformative approaches to student voice: theoretical underpinnings, recalcitrant realities. British Educational Research Journal, 30(2), 295-311
4. Fielding, M and Bragg, S (2003). Students as Researchers: Making a Difference. Pearson Publishing
Children's Research Centre: childrens-research-centre.open.ac.uk
July 2005
|
|
