‘A little bit of advice’: Working creatively with children and their foster cares to explore how they would like to share their experiences

Mannay, Dawn ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7368-4111 2023. ‘A little bit of advice’: Working creatively with children and their foster cares to explore how they would like to share their experiences. Presented at: International Creative Research Methods Conference, Manchester, UK, 11-12 September 2023.

Microsoft Powerpoint (PPTX) - Presentation Download (2MB)

Abstract

There is often an assumption that creative methods are participatory. However, the introduction of arts-based approaches does not necessarily confer more equal research relationships where the perspectives of participants are centralised. This presentation considers the importance of working with ‘experts by experience’ and planning for future research beyond the perfunctory pilot study. The creative activities outlined in this presentation offered a space for children and their carers to consider ‘what works’ and also what ‘may not work’ as strategies to engage children to share their perspectives. The projects were initially envisaged as all-day events with a range of creative activities, a communal lunch, and games, where children would work with the project team to try different activities, discuss their preferences, and generate new ideas that could be drawn on to support children in talking about features of their everyday lives. It was envisaged that foster carers would simply bring their children to the events. However, with the outset of the Coronavirus pandemic the team needed to rethink the project design and consider how to be creative in an online context. The project team designed a range of activities and families were posted packs and instructions. These included a Rockstar Activity that invited children to paint stones to representing happiness, and a Message in a Bottle Activity, where children decorated a bottle and wrote a note about themselves for imagined others to find. As these activities had shifted to the home, foster carers moved from the periphery of the original design and took a central role, assisting children with the activities and feeding back with children in online elicitation discussions. Children in this first phase formed an advisory committee and generated ideas for the second phase by creating activity ideas. In the second phase we made adaptions to the original activities and introduced new activities based on children’s ideas and preferences, and the advice from foster carers about what children had enjoyed and what was more challenging or less engaging. The second phase offered a menu of activities, including a Wishes and Dreams letter tile activity, a Road Trip build a car activity, and Fly Away activity that featured a plane making kit. Again, these were posted to foster families and followed with online feedback sessions. The 10 children were aged between eight and eleven years old and they and their foster carers were centralised throughout the project as ‘experts by experience’. The project provided an opportunity to move beyond simply arriving to do creative research with children and offered a dedicated space for children to act as the designers for future projects. The critical eye of children and their foster carers was invaluable in uncovering the design faults with our activities, adult centric ideas about what was suitable, and some unintended consequences of the project design. The presentation calls on creative researchers to build in time to work with participants at the design stage so that projects can shift from simply having participatory potential to becoming genuinely informed by children.

Item Type:	Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)
Status:	Submitted
Schools:	Children’s Social Care Research and Development Centre (CASCADE) Social Sciences (Includes Criminology and Education)
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > H Social Sciences (General)
Uncontrolled Keywords:	creative methods; children; foster care; remote methods
Related URLs:	https://www.creativeresearchmethods.com/
Last Modified:	13 May 2024 08:49
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/168494

Actions (repository staff only)

Edit Item