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By Alison Blunt, Queen Mary University of London

 

In the wise words of JK Rowling’s, Dumbledore, “A child’s voice, however honest and true, is meaningless to those who have forgotten how to listen.” Our recent experience working with and hearing from children and young people about their experiences during the COVID crisis has opened up a number of opportunities for us as researchers, not only in terms of working with children and young people as an audience for our research, but in terms of considering children and young people as collaborators, investigators and future thinkers.

But what does it look like to engage with and reach out to the next generation of geographers, to pose important questions and really listen to the answers that come forward?

From 2020-2022 we were part of the AHRC funded Stay Home Stories project. Our particular strand of work sought to understand how children’s experiences of home changed during the COVID-19 pandemic and its associated restrictions. When we began the study, everyone’s day to day lives had been thrown into turmoil. This was particularly the case for children and young people whose lives normally tend to operate around the framing of the normal school day. With children of care workers being the exception, most children and young people were no longer able to attend school in person; while some were able to access learning online, there were mixed experiences therein, depending on availability and access to adequate technology and resources. Some had moved in with grandparents or relatives while their parents worked on the front line. Time outside was severely restricted and socialising beyond immediate family bubbles was prohibited, affecting types and modes of play. In many cases, children and young people were spending much more time in very close proximity with family, competing to find spaces of their own, and many were feeling the effects of external, national level decisions being imposed on them.

In the midst of this moment of unprecedent disruption, we saw a real need to give children and young people the opportunity to talk and express their feelings about their lived experiences at home. We were keen to explore how we might use geography as a platform for this work and to encourage those children and young people to use their observational and mapping skills to articulate their personal and individual experience of the pandemic. 

Through the Stay Home Stories project we invited children, via their schools, to draw us a map of their home as they perceived and experienced it during the COVID crisis. With the support of the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) and concurrent running of their Young Geographer of the Year competition on the same theme, we received over 375 maps from pupils in schools across the UK and in some cases from other countries too. Once lockdown restrictions were relaxed, we also hosted a number of mapping workshops in the classroom at schools in the Liverpool City region to work with teachers and pupils on the development of their maps while discussing the content with their creators. The act of mapping encouraged engagement with a sense of place while also honing spatial skills. Given the work involved children and young people, ethical and safeguarding considerations were front and centre of all our planning with this work right from the research design phase.

The maps from across the different strands of work, a selection of which can be seen on the map gallery hosted by the RGS-IBG, revealed how young people’s experiences of the home space may have changed during the COVID-19 restrictions. There were several recurrent themes represented on the maps, including the sense of being bounded in at home, with the walls of the home providing at once a physical restriction but also a defensive barrier to a hazardous outside world. Many of the maps include depictions of the COVID virus as an alien invader from outer space and there is a very clear focus on the use of technology in the home, for home schooling or in terms of connection with friends and family. Outdoor spaces including gardens, yards, pavements, balconies, local green spaces and parks, assumed greater prominence on many of the maps for the sense of escape they offered. On the theme of green spaces, we also had the privilege of working with Write Back - a young writers’ project based in Barking and Dagenham - and together produced a film My Place My Space in which this talented group of writers express in their own words the importance of green spaces for wellbeing. Further work is now being developed looking at the relationship between COVID experience, use of green spaces and improvements in environmental competency.

Some of these themes formed the focus for short written pieces, blog posts and podcasts during the course of the project. The mapping initiative also provided a set of materials from which Dr Paula Owens, an independent education consultant specialising in primary geography and curriculum development, was able to develop educational resources for key stage 1 and 2 Geography pupils on themes of home, the outside world, memory and spatial awareness, changing spatial relationships and places of the future.

Having a platform in the form of the gallery to showcase the maps as they were being submitted, along with these educational resources, was key for encouraging schools to participate in the initiative, though having a range of public engagement tools was also essential to maintain momentum and engagement with the work during what was unprecedented period of crisis. Our hope is that the materials produced as a result of the mapping project will be preserved as a unique archive, expressing children and young people’s experiences of an extraordinary time.

The work provides a rich source of social data for our own research and for other academics to better understand, place-making, children’s spatial perceptions, environmental competency to name just a few key areas of enquiry. The maps that were produced have also become core to the policy reports produced as part of the broader Stay Home project (see Burrell et al., 2021 and Blunt et al., 2022).

In terms of our next steps, we have begun extension work with the Greater London Authority, applying the methodology through schools-based workshops to co-explore how children understand and articulate concerns over local place based environmental issues. In addition to providing a suite of maps for the GLA’s Community Insights Hub, we have worked with an independent animator, Diwas Bisht, to produce a short public engagement animation based on some of the school workshop maps. We look forward to seeing how this kind of approach might help to further young people’s engagement with geography and environmental issues.

 

Further reading

 

How to cite

Blunt, A. (2023) School engagement: mapping home during the COVID crisis. Communicating research beyond the academy. Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) Guide. Available at: https://doi.org/10.55203/OBAJ8334

 

About this guide

There’s a long tradition of geographers communicating research ‘beyond the academy’ - to policy, to publics, to young people, to school teachers -  whether to recruit students, for career development, critical praxis and activism, or requirements of funders to document ‘impact’. Ten years ago we published the Communicating Geographical Research Beyond the Academy guide. It sought to bring together and share collective experience and learning, from within and beyond the academy. Today, there’s ever more opportunities and modes and media with which to do this. While many of the points made – about audience, about access, about brevity and the use of plain English – still stand, this collection covers these already familiar issues as well as bringing new perspectives to encourage readers to reflect on motives, means and methods and to illuminate examples of good practice.

 

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