Aim of the workshop

The aim of our methodological workshop is to discuss the usage of creative methods in research with
children. We would like to introduce a game that we call “Who pulls the strings” (Moree, Bittl 2007).  Social gaming can be employed in research to fuel social interaction that reveals the relations within the social group. First we will introduce our research project and the context in which we employed the creative methods of data collection among children. Then the participants of the workshop will be invited to play the game with us and later we will explore the nature of interactions that emerged during the game. We will reflect on the motivations and sources of social processes within the group dynamics as cooperation, exclusion, taking the lead, rebellion, resignation etc. In the third part of the workshop, we will discuss the possibilities of using this and similar methods in research. We will talk about the ways in which to keep the record and interpret the data. We will also address ethical issues. The “Who pulls the strings” game can be used not only by researchers but also by educators either to explore the group dynamics or to initiate the debate about power and exclusion/inclusion processes.

Context of our research

Czech classrooms are getting increasingly ethnically diverse. After the long decades of ethnic homogeneity, students of various national and cultural backgrounds started to attend Czech schools. How do they, their classmates and teachers understand their difference? When is it made visible and in what situations is ethnic difference obliterated? How are children talking about and how are they doing ethnicity?
“Central and Eastern Europe before World War II resembled a painting by Kokoschka, full of subtle nuances of different tones; after the war, it became closer to a painting by Modigliani, dominated by monochromatic scenery,” noted Jacques Rupnik (1993: 75). In the interwar period, a full third of Czechoslovakia population was of ethnically different backgrounds with a large German community. When the after-war ethnic cleansing was complete, this percentage dropped drastically to 6.1% (Leszek, Kosinski 1969). During the state socialist period between 1948 and 1989, migration was severely limited and more people left the authoritarian Czechoslovakia then came to live here. The fall of the Iron Curtain brought about an explosion of cross-border mobility in the former Soviet space. The Czech Republic was no exception. The Czech education system is set to operate in an ethnically homogeneous society and our 3-year-long research project investigates how the changing realities manifest themselves in everyday life of a classroom. We have already analyzed the ways in which teachers approach their new-coming students. We found out that teachers deploy discursive practices of “sameness despite difference” that obscure the growing diversity. We have shown that in case of migrant children, teachers tend not to see their differences and potential structural disadvantages.
In this proposed workshop, we want to understand how pupils as social actors make sense of ethnicity, their own as well as that of others. We are particularly interested in the contexts, situations, and types of speeches that reveal various kinds of difference. We want to identify the circumstances that bring out the category of ethnicity with its exclusionary potential. We will focus on the classroom dynamics analyzing the social game “Who pulls the strings.” We understand this game as a creative space where power relations in pupils’ interactions can be seen. Also, while most of the time children spend in school is structured by teachers, a game allows children to bring their definition of situations and express their point of view.

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