The presentation will detail an ongoing project, the ‘Visualising Opportunities: Inclusion for Children, Education and Society’ (VOICES) project. VOICES has been designed to involve children, young people and the adults that work with them to explore issues and concerns relating to children and young people’s experiences of inclusion in education. The intention of the research is to provide spaces for exploring how children’s rights can be invigorating by revisiting how inclusive educational practice is, or can be, implemented.

The objective of the VOICES project is to explore how children and young people might be included within the design and delivery of education in a more inclusive way. This intention aligns to the requirement to “recognise the right of the child to education, and with a view to achieving this right progressively and on the basis of equal opportunity” as stated by the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (Article 28.1, 1989) and the need for children to be consulted on practices that affect them (Section 2B of UK Children and Families Act, 2004). However, despite drastic changes in the experience of education between 2020 and 2022 due to the Covid 19 pandemic, the UK Government has offered minimal guidance on how teachers can listen and respond to the personal experiences of children which might be affecting their engagement with education. In order to start to address this gap in guidance, we seek to share and discuss examples of pedagogies that can be used to help practitioners, parents and researchers to understand how the experiences and priorities of children and young people can impact on their health and wellbeing and therefore ability to engage in education. We feel the sharing of our work is timely because of the rise of concerns over mental health. In the UK over 25% of 11 to 16 year olds with a mental health problem reporting self-harm or attempts to take their own life (NHS Digital, 2021).  This same group are almost twice as likely to have been bullied or bullied others and are more likely to have been excluded from school (ibid, 2021). The ongoing challenges presented by our post-pandemic society have created an urgent need to explore innovative and creative ways to engage children who are at risk of exclusion and mental health difficulties and to foster new and enterprising inclusive practice which makes best use of the financial resources available, especially in light of the radical reforms planned for education in the latest SEN Green Paper (DfE/DoH, 2022).

In addressing this need, a key tenet of the VOICES project has been to reject the idea that there is a clear, fixed or incontestable understanding about what constitutes educational inclusion (Dunne et al. 2018) or good practice. Rather, we use a qualitative, creative arts-based approach to find out about the realities, feelings and beliefs of children and young people in relation to their experiences of education. We adopt this approach because we feel that education can be an important site for altering discriminatory practices and changing attitudes about the slippery concept of inclusion (Hodkinson, 2020). This is necessary, as it has been argued that for changes to be implemented that challenge the status quo we need to be willing to interrogate norms and expectations (hooks, 2003). To do so, in the VOICES project children and young people’s voices and opinions are foregrounded and brought into dialogue with education professionals, relevant UK legislation and UN guidance relating to inclusion and expectations, to determine how their diverse voices and experiences can inform curricula, teaching and learning (Allan, 2015; Nyachae, 2016; Rix, 2020).

The VOICES project adopts an innovative qualitative, visual approach to research and data collection that aims to strengthen the presence of children and young people’s diverse perspectives in understanding inclusive educational practice (see Woolhouse, 2019). Multisensory photo-elicitation and arts-based methods were developed drawing upon established academic research around the participatory creation and sharing of photographic and other artistic materials (Barley, & Russell, 2019; Bertling, 2020; Shaw, 2021). We designed a pedagogy whereby children and young people were invited to produce and/or annotate anonymised photographs which could instigate discussion. They were also invited to be involved in artistic, creative engagements in response to these discussions to enhance the potential for their voices and experiences to be heard. In the initial phase of the study children and young people from four schools in North West England were invited to take photographs during their everyday school activities that they felt represented inclusion or exclusion. Each photographer was asked to comment on why they had taken the photograph and what it meant to them. These annotated photographs then became the basis for school-based workshops within which children and young people created ‘artified’, annotated photographs, scenarios and other materials including self portraits and origami sculptures to facilitate the sharing of their views and experiences regarding inclusion and / or marginalisation. In doing so they were able to discuss issues of relevance to them and create further materials to facilitate the exploring of issues that affected them. The use of multisensory and creative pedagogies within education is rooted with the Montessori (2013) approach to learning, which has been adapted to harness children's sense of wonder, use of art based free play and exploratory learning within a holistic approach by educational researchers such as Bernardi (2020). The various visual and tactile materials that were created within the workshops have been collated to form a resource toolkit, which can be utilised to explore how individuals feel about key issues relating to inclusion, diversity and identity within their education. The aim of the research is to consider and reframe how professionals can elicit, really listen to and respond appropriately to the views and experiences of the children and young people they work to support. We will describe the range of multisensory strategies which have been developed and provide examples of the materials created by children and young people. We do so because sharing and engaging with multiple, diverse viewpoints can enable fruitful discussion and change understandings (Stockall, 2013).

We will discuss what we have learnt from the project in relation to two aspects. Firstly, how photo elicitation and artistic creation can facilitate discussion and the understanding of diverse opinions. Secondly, we will consider how the activities designed were adapted for different school settings to offer suggestions on revisiting how children and young people can be central to developing more inclusive approaches and environments. We will address how throughout the project we have sought to acknowledge that the children and young people we work with are knowledgeable insiders who can teach us about their experiences of being included (or not) within education. We do so because we feel this approach provides us with a greater understanding of differing experiences and can be the groundwork for creating stronger and more trusting relationships. To build on this idea, we will also review the pedagogies employed to consider alternative ways to facilitate listening to children and young people’s voices and so enhance reflections on experiences of inclusion and marginalisation within education and society. Sharing our project via this presentation offers a space for us to share practical examples that we feel can help transform how children and young people are involved in discussions about inclusion as an educational right. Finally, we will consider how the approaches we use within our empirical research can be adapted to better engage children and young people in collaboratively working with professionals to redesign inclusive learning, policy or environments that really attend to their needs.

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