What? Anthropology By Children/Communities or ‘ABC’ is a creative citizen science-style approach to ‘Pupil Voice’, the agenda which aims to document and represent young student voices in decision-making about them. Developed and trialled by Dr Kelly Fagan Robinson alongside teachers and children since 2021, ABC draws lessons from ‘Participant Action Research’ (PAR) in which interlocutors not only lead data collection but also drive analytic categories through their engagement (Freire 2021; see also Boal 2014), supporting children and young people’s legibility to educators, their families and their surrounding communities.
How? ABC uses creative ethnographic (ethnographic = ‘life-mapping’) examination of school-based and extracurricular social ecologies to build young people’s communication and self-advocacy skills. It connects anthropology’s primary method – ethnographic research – to student listening and playing detective in the aim of understanding what it means to be human, uncovering clues about different things that matter to people in specific social and spatial contexts. Based on a multimodal methods curriculum developed for MPhil students at Cambridge, young people and those in their support networks learn how to use skills they already possess in new ways:
