Collaborative ethnography with children and
young people: Displaying Complex Cultures
in Writing and Art
Steve Pool
Kate Pahl
29th March 2012
Questions
• How can children’s voices be heard?
• What methods allow children’s voices to be
heard?
• History of Creative Partnerships
• Research as agentive
• Social science as constructing the field
Some of our projects
• A Reason to Write (2009-10)
• Writing in the Home and in the Street (201011)
• We have worked collaboratively and published
together including Pahl, et al (2009) and Pahl
and Pool (2011)
• Reciprocal mode of working focusing on
intersection between lived experience and art
methods
Some of our influences
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Eric Lassiter, Collaborative Ethnography (2005)
Grant Kestor, Conversation Pieces (2004)
Les Back, The Art of Listening (2007)
Williams, R. (1961) The Long Revolution.
Sarah Pink Doing Sensory Ethnography (2009)
Richard Sennett (2012) Together
John Law After Method (2004)
A Reason to Write
• Artist, musician and a photographer plus a
researcher for 2 years in the school
• In first year, focused on children’s Reasons to Write
• Project became focused on relationship between the
place and what were the children’s reasons to make
meaning.
• In second year research was participatory
• Funded by Cape, UK
Hinterland
• Focus on participatory methodologies
• Children investigated how the artists helped them
learn in the classroom.
• They used FLIP videos, still images and group
discussion to collect and analyse data
• Extended reflective discussions where final images
were decided on
• Focus on living your life, and loss
Living your life
Courtney: Its not about being good all the time at
school its about spending your life in school because
it is the only chance you’ve got
Kate: You said something else about drama and in
between…
C: When you are in drama you can act out but you can
also act out in school its about spending your life,
and its is not just about drama you can just live your
life
Robbie: Before it, Declan he said, let me video you, he
said no, I went to take picture, Declan danced like
that, I took a picture, it went all blurring so we
deleted that one, we were going to do loads so we
could like just place finger and make it into a video
SP: animation
A: We were all like messing about Declan started
dancing
R: It’s a good picture though I like the picture
Declan Dancing
C: Its like the playground, its your life that you
are doing, cos is our last year in this school so
R: And I can’t wait to leave
C: And its Declan’s next
C: Fairhill is going to be a different school and in
two years its going to change
• The messy nature of the project clouds the
gap between the emic and etic
• it is more difficult to own something when you
don't know where the edges are.
• The shared epistemological space recognised
that young people were intuitive in second
stage data analysis
• we needed a system which was non
hierachical
• Mess was important in this as was the
abandonment of systematic ordering of data
as the connections and taxonomies we would
develop were not the children’s.
• Declan dancing - playground footage selected
by pupils as points of "Acting out" " been
yourself" a connection which may not of
arisen if we had applied systems which did not
allow this juxtaposition (Outside play for
example)
Some concerns
• How we manage the vast data set we might
collect in relation to children’s expectations of
‘fairness’ and inclusion within the classroom?
• How do we manage classroom and researcher
time constraints?
• Whose data is it and what is the hierarchy?
• Technical determinism as a difficulty
Writing in home and in the Street
• Stimulus was video made by Steve Pool and
Richard Steadman-Jones about the writing
they found in the East Herringthorpe area
• Children responded by conducting a series of
walk arounds
• They then produced a film and two
PowerPoints that were shown to the School
Improvement Service and at the ESRC festival
Writing in the street
Kate: When you see a nasty word do you think it
is good or bad?
Marianne: Bad. We have got it on our gates
someone wrote it! When I first moved into my
house there was graffiti all over the wall and
they had had a paintball fight. You can still see
it, it were black and it were white and it was
hard to get off. Me granddad had to do that.
(Discussion in the street recorded in June
2011)
Kate: I want to know what you think of the
graffiti on this slide?
Luke: It’s all rude! We should spray it.
It’s not fair on
young children
Outputs need to evolve from the
project
• Article
– Different ways of working
– Abandoning social science approaches
– school response
• Film
– Specific audience for specific purpose
• Book
– Exhibition space as conferring value and
ownership
Some thoughts
• Research with children sometimes runs
counter to their ideas of what research is or
can be
• Embedded practice as a form of praxis
• Spatial epistemologies – looking for holding
forms where this can happen
• Bringing together participatory with the
academic
Our experience
• The choice of ‘holding form’ has to be
congruent with children’s experience of the
affordances of that holding form
• Purpose and audience is vital
• What is the" purpose" of developing this
approach?
• How does this way of working differ from
other research "With young people“?
John Law (2004)
So the real is real enough. It is obdurate. It cannot be
wished away. But it is also made. And in some
measure that which is socially real is made by, and
through, the instruments of social analysis. If this is
right then the political grammar of social
investigation undergoes an interesting shift. The
issue is not simply how what is out there can be
uncovered and brought to light, though this remains
an important issue. It is also about what might be
made in the relations of investigation, what might be
brought into being.
• Messy kitchens – you can clean a little space in
the clutter to cook in
• Or you can make a big space and clear
everything up before you start to cook
• Positivism makes you want to clean everything
up before you cook a meal.