Conference Agenda

This is an interactive research workshop to support colleagues who are committed to promoting children’s voice in research, in their pedagogic practices and in the learning environments co-created in communities. It is a complementary part of our participation in the conference, together with our paper presentation (Cassidy, Beaton et al) reflecting our dialogic and participatory intent. Drawing on our previous work addressing the lacuna of work around implementing Article 12 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC: UN 1989) with children under seven, the Look Who’s Talking Project published eight factors for voice with young children (Wall et al. 2019; Arnott and Wall, 2022): Definition, Power, Inclusivity, Listening, Space and Time, Approaches, Processes and Purposes. We assert that for children’s talk to be encouraged, adults have to be engaged in talk too and so these factors have been presented along with a set of provocation style questions. We propose that by outlining factors and posing questions in this way we are providing the foundation for translating the recommendations of the UNCRC Article 12 (UN 1989), with respect to the right to voice, into practice for young children.

We have proposed that these eight factors should work in harmony to prompt reflective and strategic thinking for all those who work with and for children. Such work, we assert, should be undertaken in such a way as to ensure that the dialogue is ongoing and adapting to the children’s and adults’ growing competence and confidence. The elicitation of voice, therefore, requires a dialogue that is receptive to the contexts and individuals involved; this dialogue obviously should include children. The dialogue ought to involve people interacting with one another, but also with the concepts featured in the eight factors. While each factor may be considered individually, it is also important that they are treated as interconnected and interdependent. For example, listening is vital in eliciting voice, and action will not be meaningful if due thought and dialogue does not take place in relation to defining voice itself or if there is no commitment to time and space for voice in practice.

Our ethos is towards a culture of collaboration and voice, and the intent of this work is to establish a space where knowledge exchange is multi-directional as we share the factors, but also value, learn and build from existing practices. Building on an interactive workshop at ECEERA (Arnott et al. 2017), this workshop will use dialogic methods to co-construct the understanding of underpinning factors and key research questions in children’s voice. Here, we will firstly present for exploration and interrogation the eight voice factors and the questions they evoke; participants will then explore the utility and priority of the eight factors for their work and contexts; finally, we will introduce the Web – our current dynamic iteration of the visual framework of the 8 factors to explore and interrogate practice. The Web provides a metaphor which can be used to facilitate professional reflection on the development of voice practice by either an individual or a group of practitioners. Key to the purpose of the metaphor of the web is that the agency lies with the individual or group of practitioners who themselves determine priorities and the modes (threads) by which the eight factors are linked together so that voice is promoted multi-modally.