We are happy to announce the theme for the month of November and December on the CCYSC Blog:
'Ways of Listening to Children and Youth'
The new sociology of childhood brought to light and attention to a new conceptualization of childhood that recognizes children as capable of contributing to debates in the society that concern their well-being, development, and daily life and voicing concerns. Researchers underline listening as a pedagogical tool in making space for and understanding children’s feelings, words, and actions and make sense of these in the social contexts in which children are not only growing up against the backdrop of but are also as active participants in the everyday conduct. Yet there remains little documentation of young children’s views (Clark et al 2003), especially in the context of narratives within the neoliberal policy and research agenda that serves to maximize curricular pursuits (Yoon and Nguyen-Templeton 2019). In the aftermath of the COVID-19 outbreak, where education and leisure opportunities of children are significantly disrupted and transformed, it is even more important that children are listened to and their perspectives accounted for to be able to improve their experiences.
We invite you to make contributions to the Critical Childhood and Youth Studies Collective Blog under the theme for the months of November and December, ‘Ways of Listening to Children and Youth’, to share from your thinking and writing about the ways in which you use listening as a tool in working with children and young people. In the months of September-October, we looked at the voices of youth and children. In this month’s theme, we are seeking to explore the multiple ways, tools, and methodologies employed by teachers, researchers, parents, significant adults, and people working with children and youth, in order to listen to these voices. What are the research tools being increasingly used and favored by researchers to record children’s voices? Which of these tools ‘worked’ and why? Which of the methods didn’t work in a certain context and why? How could we devise and design a holistic approach for listening to children in diverse contexts? It seeks to explore the creative and innovative ways of listening to children and youth that have been used by practitioners, scholars, parents, teachers, and caregivers. With this, we hope to create a repository of practical, ethical, and creative tools. We welcome short contributions in the form of essays/articles/research journal entries/visual and graphic representations of research tools/ video journals made by researchers etc. Written contributions should not be more than 1500-2000 words. For video contributions, please ensure that the file size is not more than 10GB. All material should be sent to childyouth2020@gmail.com.
We look forward to your contributions!