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


Julie Garlen, Carleton University; Sarah Hembruff, Carleton University

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.

This paper will be presented at the following session: