The past fifty years have seen a remarkable increase in the scope and scale of consumer activity. A growing amount of activities and aspects of human interaction - particularly those relating to leisure – are now being made available through the commercial market. In the last couple of decades childhood has also become the more and more a consumer childhood. We are confronted with images of children posed to capture the consuming gaze. The result is a childhood culture typified by a hybridizing of education, entertainment and advertising. Compared to the industrial society which was characterized by a spatial separation of education, work and leisure time, our post-industrial society can be subscribed in terms of a plurality and diversity of formal and informal educational environments. According to Nahrstadt (2002) today’s educational platform can be seen as a continuum of 'Erlebnisorientierte Lernorte' (experience-oriented educational environments), with learning and consuming as extreme concepts. In this paper we will explore the context of child and youth theatre as an example of a new educational environment. More specifically, the focus will be on 'De Kopergietery', a Flemish child and youth theatre, founded in 1979 and regarded as a leading European cultural institute for children and young people. In our analysis of 'De Kopergietery' as an educational environment, we will defend a relational approach to childhood. Studies within this approach depart from the relationships of children and not the children as individuals. The goal of this change is to reach a perspective on childhood that takes into account the social, economic and cultural contexts within which images of children are shaped in the past and the present. As a result, childhood is a concept that is constructed and reconstructed within specific contexts that are continuously subject to change and where the meaning of what children are, could be and should, can never be definitively determined.

Two central research questions are at stake. First of all we will question how ‘De Kopergietery’ as an informal educational environment configures childhood and adulthood. Secondly, we focus on the implications for the pedagogical relation between child and adult. To answer these questions, we will analyze theatre performances in which special attention is given to the child, images of childhood or a certain problem concerning children and their socio-cultural environment, within the central context of the children’s rights (for instance ‘The right shoes’ (1993-94), ‘Achter Glas’ (1994-95), ‘Balmoral’ (2002-03)). Visual materials, video recordings of the performances, pictures, flyers, newspaper articles, announcements and advertisements, children’s signatures, theatre scripts will be the subject of this study.

The essential role of our relational approach to theatre performances about and with children mainly lies in breaking through the polarization between childhood and adulthood. Within the framework of Children's Rights and its focus on the participation of children and the agency of the child, we will present the child and youth theatre context as a place where the subjectivity of the child and the subjectivity of the adult can meet each other. In line with Kennedy (2002), it will be argued that child and youth theatre as an informal educational environment can function as a place of transformation (of the child, the adult and society).