Helen Manchester

Pedagogies of Student Voice

For many years, the concept of ‘student voice’ was seen as a marginal issue for educators, the preserve of a passionate, dedicated minority. The literature on voice had to persuade and convince as much as to analyze, whilst the ‘emancipatory’, democratic intentions and outcomes of practitioners were often taken for granted. Now, however, ‘student voice’ is being endorsed and elaborated across a remarkably broad spectrum of contemporary educational thinking, policymaking and provision. It therefore risks being caught up in generalized denunciations of ‘neoliberal’ trends in education. Yet both excessive optimism and undue suspicion represent inadequate responses. ‘Student voice’ is enacted, brought into being, rather than immanent or pre-existing: the term designates a diverse range of practices that require careful, situated interpretation if we are to understand their meanings and effects, and this paper attempts to provide an example of such an analytical approach. It draws on research into how one organization, the flagship English ‘creative learning’ programme Creative Partnerships, attempted to ‘put young people at the heart’ of its work. The paper takes a broader frame than is often the case in student voice literature, locating Creative Partnerships within national government policy and regional and local contexts, and attending to the multiple, sometimes conflicting, practices, processes and sites through which ‘youth voice’ was produced. It analyses the subjectivities, self-imaginings, capacities and narratives that ‘voice’ practices offered to teachers, students, artists and others involved. Through such interpretive frames, the paper hopes to produce more complex ‘ways of seeing’ student voice projects, better able to acknowledge their ambivalent effects in reconfiguring educational power relations and processes, but also more attuned to moments of creativity, surprise and difference of the kind that might make a difference to schooling.

Space, Place, and Social Justice in Education Growing a Bigger Entanglement: Editors’ Introduction

Here, guest editors N. Geoffrey Bright, Helen Manchester, and Sylvie Allendyke (formerly Sarah Dyke) introduce this special issue of Qualitative Inquiry on space, place, and social justice in education. They explore how the thematic focus originated in a series of informal and formal discussions that came together in an international research seminar that took place in Manchester, United Kingdom, in summer 2012. That event considered how qualitative inquirers in education research are currently deploying the “spatial turn” in social theory to respond to a global context of increasingly asymmetrical power relations. Uniquely, that is, the Manchester seminar called for a discussion that articulated theoretical interrogations of space and place to practical approaches aimed at doing social justice in education and education research. Picking up topics raised by the contributing authors and relating them to their own work, the editors explore the connections, divergences, and novel productivities that are evident in the theoretical and practical approaches adopted, noting their fruitfulness for an ongoing practice of “entanglement” in which research, as an aspect of living justly, might reside.

Space, Place, and Social Justice in Education

Here, guest editors N. Geoffrey Bright, Helen Manchester, and Sylvie Allendyke (formerly Sarah Dyke) introduce this special issue of Qualitative Inquiry on space, place, and social justice in education. They explore how the thematic focus originated in a series of informal and formal discussions that came together in an international research seminar that took place in Manchester, United Kingdom, in summer 2012. That event considered how qualitative inquirers in education research are currently deploying the “spatial turn” in social theory to respond to a global context of increasingly asymmetrical power relations. Uniquely, that is, the Manchester seminar called for a discussion that articulated theoretical interrogations of space and place to practical approaches aimed at doing social justice in education and education research. Picking up topics raised by the contributing authors and relating them to their own work, the editors explore the connections, divergences, and novel productivities that are evident in the theoretical and practical approaches adopted, noting their fruitfulness for an ongoing practice of “entanglement” in which research, as an aspect of living justly, might reside.

TopoTiles: Storytelling in Care Homes with Topographic Tangibles

In this paper we present our initial ethnographic work from developing TopoTiles, Tangible User Interfaces designed to aid storytelling, reminiscence and community building in care homes. Our fieldwork has raised a number of questions which we discuss in this paper including: How can landscape tangibles be used as proxy objects, standing in for landscape and objects unavailable to the storyteller? How can tangible interfaces be used in an indirect or peripheral manner to aid storytelling? Can miniature landscapes aid recollection and story telling through embodied interaction? Are ambiguous depictions conducive to storytelling? Can topographic tangibles encourage inclusivity in group sharing situations? In this paper we share our initial findings to these questions and show how they will inform further TopoTiles design work.

School ethos and the spatial turn: ‘capacious’ approaches to research and practice

This article argues that specific spatial imaginaries are embedded in current debates about school ethos and research methods. It takes the reader on a journey around an English multicultural primary school supported by the creative learning program Creative Partnerships, exploring how creative arts practices (re)configured sociospatial relations within the school community over a 3-year period. The article proposes the metaphor of “capaciousness” to illuminate aspects of research and practice in schools concerning space, learning, and the significance of the connections of schools to other spaces, places, and networks. Recognizing these connections enables us to take account of issues of social justice particularly in relation to schools located in areas of socioeconomic deprivation. A spatial theorization of ethos also questions the concept of boundaries in case study research, and highlights the role of researcher interpretation in constituting what can be recognized as “creative” school ethos.

Teenage Kicks: exploring cultural value from a youth perspective

In contemporary accounts of cultural value, young peoples perspectives are often restricted to analyses of their encounters with formal cultural institutions or schools or to debates surrounding the cultural implications of new digital spaces and technologies. Other studies have been dominated by instrumental accounts exploring the potential economic benefit and skills development facilitated by young peoples cultural encounters and experiences. In this paper we examine the findings of a nine month project, which set out to explore what cultural value means to young people in Bristol. Between October 2013 and March 2014, the Arts and Humanities Research Council “Teenage Kicks” project organised 14 workshops at 7 different locations across the city, with young people aged 11–20. Working in collaboration with a network of cultural and arts organisations, the study gathered a range of empirical data investigating the complex ecologies of young peoples everyday/“lived” cultures and values. Young peoples own accounts of their cultural practices challenge normative definitions of culture and cultural value but also demonstrate how these definitions act to reproduce social inequalities in relation to cultural participation and social and cultural capital. The paper concludes that cultural policy-makers should listen and take young peoples voices seriously in re-imaging the citys cultural offer for all young people.

Barriers to a better Bristol: Diagnosing city strategic sustainability challenges using systems, co-production and interdisciplinary approaches

As European Green Capital 2015 and one of the Rockefeller 100 Resilient Cities, Bristol can legitimately claim to be on the “frontline” of urban sustainability, continually challenging itself to transform into a place where citizens and organisations work together to create wellbeing. Yet the development pathway to achieving this transformation, remains characterised by continuing inequalities in social inclusion, health outcomes and access to transport, despite aspirational goals envisioned by the city’s leaders. The Urban ID (Integrated Diagnostic) project aims to address this, with the intention that the approach will be replicable in different contexts to assist in developing policy strategies at all levels. The project partnership of local authorities, partnerships, businesses, citizens, and universities is creating a “diagnostic approach” to identify and address the challenges and barriers faced in achieving a strategic sustainability vision. The diagnostic approach is being developed through participatory research using systems, co-creation and learning approaches between a diverse range of stakeholders, in combination with the examination of relevant information including city data, expert opinion, and policy documents. A common shortcoming of projects addressing sustainability in a holistic way is that individual issues are investigated without consideration of the interdependencies between them and with a ‘business-as-usual’ mindset. To address these shortcomings, Urban ID focusses on several local case studies as well as a city-wide sustainability community case study. These are examined through the ‘lenses’ of mobility and accessibility, carbon neutrality, health and happiness, and equality and inclusion. As a result, all issues in a case study area are examined, to better understand the links between them. This paper provides an overview of the Urban ID concept and development of the diagnostic approach, and reports the initial findings and outcomes from a first-round of engagement activities in the Bristol Green Capital Partnership (BGCP) sustainability community case study, co-produced with BGCP CIC

(Re)-Learning the City for Intergenerational Exchange

Two major international agendas are currently working to realign social, material and representational elements of the city in ways that are helpful for both children and older adults. The Age Friendly City movement (AFC) (led by the World Health Organisation) and the Child Friendly Cities (CFC) movement (led by UNICEF) aim to ensure that planners, policy makers and developers design cities that take account of the interests of age groups who are too often marginalised in current policy and design processes. These movements are valuable and important in themselves, however they also have significant implications for the future of a learning city in which intergenerational exchange is valued. In this chapter, in order to understand better how the city might (re) learn to become intergenerational, we explore different intergenerational assemblages, looking at what is being aligned, and connected in the AFC and CFC movements. We then describe a performative, experimental project that sought to enable different alignments between these movements. A key element of this involved building new imaginative ideas about what might be possible in order to realign these generational assemblages for intergenerational, civic learning. Finally we explore what worked and didn’t work, what resisted enrolment, what was easily aligned and what routines were disrupted.

Considerate, convivial and capacious? Finding a language to capture ethos in ‘creative’ schools

ABSTRACT Concepts of school ‘ethos’ or ‘culture’ have been widely debated in education since the 1980s. This is partly as a consequence of marketisation, partly because ethos has been identified as a low-cost route to school improvement. Corporate, authoritarian, and most recently ‘military’ models of ethos have been widely promulgated in the UK. Another significant strand of educational thinking, however, has emphasised ethos for and as learning: how schools might prefigure alternative, more socially just, worlds. This article argues that accounting for such divergent notions of ethos demands greater attention to the intellectual resources mobilised in interpreting educational processes. We discuss schools that used their work with the English creative learning programme, Creative Partnerships, to develop what we describe as ‘considerate, convivial and capacious’ school ethos. We aim thereby to value their achievements, provide tools to contest dominant discourses around ethos, and advocate more critical, reflexive approaches to researching school cultures.