Various Projects from spring 2023-2024
Beacon is an inclusive secondary school in Islington North. Using the ABC method Robinson conducted two separate pieces of inclusive research, with the potential for an ongoing Anthropology By Children club in future.
The first Beacon project was conducted eight weeks over search with a group of young people in spring 2023. Each student in the cohort of 15 students I met during that project navigated five different first or preferred languages during the first workshop and throughout our time together (Persian, Arabic, Portuguese, Kazakh, Spanish), six including English, with one child conversant to fluent in seven languages. Ranging in age between 11-15 years old, each of them had emigrated to the UK within the previous 6 months and had unsettled immigrant or refugee status. The children mapped their classroom and objects around them in school, and they were encouraged to use any form of notation that might help them to recall what those material clues might mean about the people who use them. We worked together to create various pieces of project work, including a photovoice reel exhibited here, which incorporated the young people’s different cultural backgrounds, their favourite songs, passions and conceptions of where they lived and where they had left, as well as their hopes for transformation of their spaces and futures.
The second group of young people who worked together using the ABC approach at Beacon were students from various year groups all of whom have Special Educational Needs and Disabilities, Neurodiversities and other educational and support requirements. The young people focused their efforts on photovoice work which facilitated reflection on and sharing of information about what makes them feel safe. Over the course of two months in autumn 2023, the children created with Robinson an audio-visual map of safe spaces, and less safe spaces in their school, and surrounding area with a view to understanding and transforming as needed.
What makes a safe space?
“When it’s quiet and there’s not a lot of people”
Is there any place you don’t like to go?
“Lunch.”
“The safest place is numbers. And numbers are always safe because if there’s a lot of you, no one’s going to even think about attacking you, are they?”
(Beacon students, 11-15 years)