Conference Agenda

This paper will consider play-based methods utilised to explore young children's experiences of family life as means for documenting children's voices. Family is a universal concept and experience for children across national borders. Much of the research around family conducted with children focuses on family composition and membership (e.g. Castren and Widmer 2015, Mason and Tipper 2008), but less is known about family-as-activity (Clark and Kehily 2013) and as a verb (Morgan 2011) where the practices of and within the family provide meaning and insight into how families relate and not just who they are related to. This paper explores such practices from the standpoint of young children, aged 3 to 4 years old, focusing on what families do on a day-to-day basis, on the everyday and the mundane. The research took place in three early childhood settings in the North of England, UK. Through sensory play-based activities with loose-parts resources children engaged in recreating what they do with their families, activating conversations about family practice. Children’s sense of self within the family and their positioning was documented by developing 'I-poems' using the Listening Guide (Gilligan 2015).

The research reported in this paper builds on existing early childhood practice and resources familiar to young children to offer novel ways of listening, documenting views and experiences. The research aim was to develop, test and disseminate innovative methods for listening to young children. This was achieved by enabling young children to articulate their understandings and experiences of family practice through play-based research methods and working in partnership with the participating early childhood settings to embed methods for listening to young children into practice alongside focus on (re)building partnerships with families following the Covid-19 pandemic. Children were supported to express views for themselves through play-based methods and a process of analysis foregrounding their voices.

The ability of a child to overcome difficulties and maintain their wellbeing is in part dependent of the systems that they are part of (Masten, 2021), including the schools, the communities, and the neighborhoods that they live in. However, little research takes an interdisciplinary approach to understand which factors support children’s wellbeing. Therefore, this research takes a transformative approach and seeks to research and to find ways to implement change (Mertens, 2017). We seek to uncover the multifaceted resources within neighborhoods that positively influence the wellbeing. The study is motivated by critical gaps in the literature, notably the prevalence of deficit-based approaches, the overlooking of children's perspectives, and the limited exploration of neighborhood resources and the complex ways in which they interact in fostering wellbeing within the school and beyond.

The neighborhoods in which children grow up impact their educational opportunities and may impede equality across their lifespan (Minh et al., 2017). At the same time, neighborhoods, which schools are a part of, may hold potential resources for children’s resilience (Ungar & Theron, 2020), or their capacity to adapt successfully to challenges (Masten & Barnes, 2018), and can possibly counter structural processes of inequality. For example, during the COVID-19 pandemic, children living in more cohesive and safer neighborhoods fared better than others in terms of physical and mental health (Robinette et al., 2021). After-school programs, community initiatives, and accessible meeting points can offer opportunities to offset possible threats to children's wellbeing and positively impact their educational outcomes. Overall, cohesive neighborhoods with a strong collective efficacy have a robust positive effect on children’s adjustment (Yule et al., 2019). Yet, our knowledge about which resources can be accessed and the ways through which these can be accessed remains rather limited with no in-depth explorations of how young people evaluate such resources.

How the complex ecosystems surrounding a child may support their positive adjustment remains unclear with some significant gaps in the current state of the literature. First, research tends to take a deficit-based approach and focus on the ways in which children are disadvantaged. Second, the perspective of children and their own experience of the resources they rely on is mostly overlooked. And third, research investigating the resources that support children’s resilience, or their capability to overcome difficulty, tends to mainly focus on the interpersonal networks in their families from a psychological perspective, on the relationship between teachers and pupils from an educational perspective, or on the social capital accessible to them, from a sociological perspective. In this project, we hope to go beyond this fragmented state of the literature and explore the resources that children rely on in their networks from the children’s own perspective. The research question we hope to answer is: “Which factors in the neighborhood their school is embedded have the potential to positively impact the children’s wellbeing, from their own perspective”. The research adopts an asset-based lens, which marks a departure from conventional deficit-oriented paradigms. By examining neighborhoods through the eyes of the children themselves, the focus is on identifying and understanding the diverse resources and strengths present within their immediate social and physical environments that foster resilience.

Central to the research question is the exploration of neighborhood and community factors which influence the capacity of children to overcome challenges. This extends beyond traditional educational perspectives and includes after-school programs, community initiatives, and accessible meeting points within the community. Our study seeks to uncover how these unconventional resources foster children's resilience and positively impact their educational outcomes and aspires to contribute to a transformative understanding of the ecosystems surrounding children in diverse and changing European cities.