Steve Pool

‘Living Your Life Because it’s the Only Life You’ve Got’

This article explores the processes and practices of doing participatory research with children. It explores how this process can be represented in writing. The article comes out of a project funded by Creative Partnerships UK, in which a creative agent, three artists and a researcher all worked within an elementary school in South Yorkshire, UK, for two years, to focus on the children’s Reasons to Write. It considers whether it is truly possible for children to enter the academic domain. Using a number of different voices, the article interrogates this. It particularly focuses on children’s role in analysing and selecting important bits of data. It engages with the lived realities of children as researchers. It considers ways in which children’s voices can be represented, and also acknowledges the limitations of this approach for adults who want to write academic peer reviewed articles. Ideas the adults thought were clever were found to be redundant in relation to children’s epistemologies. The article considers the process that is involved in taking children’s epistemologies seriously.

Artists, Art and Artefacts: Boundary Crossings, Art and Anthropology

This article attempts to present an understanding of the relationship between contemporary arts practitioners and academics through a description of a project that involved both artists and academics. It explores what the boundary crossings were in the process of doing the project, and tries to articulate what each, the artists and the academics, gained from the process of doing the project. It shows how this kind of work can both inform arts practice and also provide a new lens for academics to use in their work. It draws on a body of work that is developing around the field of contemporary arts practice and anthropology. It concludes by documenting the strengths of this way of working in terms of how each is able to inform the others practice.

In amongst the glitter and the squashed blueberries: crafting a collaborative lens for children’s literacy pedagogy in a community setting

ABSTRACT In this article, we bring together relational arts practice (Kester, 2004) with collaborative ethnography (Campbell and Lassiter, 2015) in order to propose art not as a way of teaching children literacy, but as a lens to enable researchers and practitioners to view children’s literacies differently. Both relational arts practice and collaborative ethnography decentre researcher/artist expertise, providing an understanding that “knowing” is embodied, material and tacit (Ingold, 2013). This has led us to extend understandings of multimodal literacy to stress the embodied and situated nature of meaning making, viewed through a collaborative lens (Hackett, 2014a; Heydon and Rowsell, 2015; Kuby et al, 2015; Pahl and Pool, 2011). We illustrate this approach to researching literacy pedagogy by offering a series of “little” (Olsson, 2013) moments of place/body memory (Somerville, 2013), which emerged from our collaborative dialogic research at a series of den building events for families and their young children. Within our study, an arts practice lens offered a more situated, and entwined way of working that led to joint and blurred outcomes in relation to literacy pedagogy.

When the workshop is working: The role of artists in collaborative research with young people and communities

Purpose – This paper comes from workshop activities and structured reflection by a group of artists and researchers who have been using artistic practice within research projects aimed at enabling researchers to collaborate with communities. The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach – Three out of four in the group have a practicing creative background and their own studio/workshop space. Findings – Artists are often employed – whether in schools or research projects – to run workshops; to bring a distinctive set of skills that enable learning or collaboration to take place. In this paper the authors reflect on the different meanings and connotations of “workshop” – as noun (as a place where certain types of activity happen, a bounded space) and a verb (to work something through; to make something together). From there the authors will then draw out the different principles of what artistic practice can offer towards creating a collaborative space for new knowledge to emerge. Research limitations/implications – Key ideas include different repertories of structuring to enable different forms of social interaction; the role of materal/ality and body in shifting what can be recognised as knowing; and the skills of “thinking on your feet”, being responsive and improvising. Originality/value – The authors will conclude by reflecting on aspects to consider when developing workshops as part of collaborative research projects.

Seen and unseen: using video data in ethnographic fieldwork

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to report on video making in two different contexts within the Community Arts Zone research project, an international research project concerned with the connections between arts, literacy and the community. Design/methodology/approach – At one project site, researchers and parents from the community filmed their children making dens with an artist. At another site, a professional film crew filmed young people engaged in arts practice in school settings. Findings – In both cases, researchers, artists and community participants collaborated to do research and make video. This paper discusses the ways that this work was differently positioned at the two sites. These different positionings had implications for the meaning ascribed to video making from the point of view of the participants, researchers and artists involved. Originality/value – By drawing on perspectives of researchers and artists, the paper explores implications for video making processes within ethnogra...

Visual Digital Methodologies with Children and Young People: Perspectives from the Field

When children make sense of the world, they use the resources available to them to do so. These resources might include language, gesture, stickers, pens, paper, bits of stuff found and gathered between journeys, on buses, at school, at home and in in between spaces. The process of making sense of children’s meaning making also involves understanding the stuff they use to make meaning. This ‘stuff’ can be material or (im)material (Burnett et al., 2014). It can also be multimodal, that is expressed in a variety of modes including oral, gestural, visual and somatic. Digital ‘stuff’ (Miller, 2010) is particularly interesting as a mode in which to make meaning, and also, as discussed here, as a particular mode for research. The digital offers a research approach that is congruent with young people’s existing everyday practices, and therefore can be seen as opening up the process of research in line with the modal choices of young people (Rowsell, 2013).