‘Picking up the pieces: where to next in terms of listening to young children?
ALISON CLARK, UCL Institute of Education, United Kingdom
Next year will be thirty years since the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child came into being. Children’s participation rights as expressed in Article 12 and 13 have drawn widespread attention, including in the early childhood field. This talk will make the case for 2019 to be the year to look seriously at how young children’s views and experiences have surprised and challenged researchers, practitioners and policy makers. What common threads can be pieced together from existing studies? How can such accumulated knowledge be made more visible and lead to change? Listening to young children has been the focus of my research career. This has included helping to establish the EECERA Special Interest group on Young Children’s Perspectives with Deborah Harcourt in 2004. Since then policy interest in the UK has waxed and waned. Having ‘rode the wave’ of policy engagement beginning in the late 1990s and witnessed its decline, I am increasingly aware that listening to young children is a political activity. It can trouble the status quo but may be drowned out by more powerful agendas. Firstly, I will look at surprises and challenges emerging from participatory research with young children, using moments from studies undertaken with the Mosaic approach (Clark and Moss, 2001; Clark, 2017). Secondly, I will suggest some common threads emerging from existing studies. Thirdly, I will ask why has much research in the field remained small scale and fragmentary? How might the 30th anniversary of the UNCRC herald positive change?