Michelle Newman

‘Playtime in the Borderlands’: Children's Representations of School, Gender and Bullying through Photographs and Interviews

Abstract Photography has been commonly used as a research tool in studies of childhood/children. However images of school children in official documentation are rarely taken or chosen by children and may not reflect their real experiences. This research considered the photographs taken by year six primary school children of their school and the images they chose to represent themselves. Subsequent interviews with children revealed attitudes to school, the importance of playground relationships in the construction of gender, leading to the concept of ‘borderlands’ inhabited by some boys who adopt non-hegemonic masculinities.

Student participation in school design: one school's approach to student engagement in the BSF process

The UK government is investing approximately £21.9 billion in the refurbishment or rebuilding of all secondary schools by 2021 under the Building Schools for the Future programme. One of the requirements of the scheme is student participation; however, little guidance is offered as to the form this participation should take. This paper will describe and evaluate the methods adopted by one secondary school to engage students in the design process. The approaches include a ‘Design your School’ conference, the utilisation of the Personal, Social and Health Education curriculum and accessing student voice through school councils. The research was conducted as part of an Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded project ‘Realising participatory design with children and young people: a case study of design and refurbishment in schools’.

‘All in all it is just a judgement call’: issues surrounding sexual consent in young people’s heterosexual encounters

ABSTRACT In the UK, there has been growing concern about young people’s understanding of sexual consent, with the views of young people themselves often lost in academic and educational policy debates. However, the focus on high rates of sexual violence has meant a lack of attention on the everyday negotiation of consensual heterosexual activity, leading to assumptions being made regarding young people’s lack of understanding of sexual consent. This paper emerges from a wider study of over 500 young people which sought to uncover their understanding of the issues. Drawing on data from workshops and the open text responses to an on-line survey the findings presented in this paper show that the majority of heterosexual young people understood the complexity of sexual consent as an embodied process, which can be difficult to define, talk about or practice uniformly. This complex understanding, in which sexual consent is a continuum rather than a dichotomy, has implications for sexual education initiatives. We argue that it is only by providing a closer understanding of how – within consensual sexual activities – young people understand and enact sexual consent through a range of embodied communication strategies that education surrounding sexual assault will become meaningful.