SHCY Bulletin
Society for the History of Children and Youth
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No. 14 |
Fall 2009 |
Call for Conference Reporters
As budgets in higher education continue to
shrink, the Bulletin hopes to keep
you informed about the conferences you’d like to attend but can’t afford, and
the conferences you miss just because time doesn’t permit.
Priscilla Clement is the editor for
conference reports. Please contact
her to share with SHCY members the exciting work that is regularly being
presented at the conferences of national organizations and at smaller
specialized meetings you are able to attend. We are especially interested in hearing about the
history of children and youth in conferences that take meet outside of North
America!
Contact
Priscilla at p4c@psu.edu
American Association for the History
of Medicine (AAHM), April 23-26, 2009
Cara Kinzelman, University of
Minnesota
The American
Association for the History of Medicine held its 82nd Annual Meeting
in Cleveland, Ohio, in April. Topics related to the history of childhood and
childbearing were well represented, which suggests an exciting level of
interest in the field among historians of medicine.
One of the
conference highlights was Katharine Park’s (Harvard University) Fielding H.
Garrison Lecture titled “Birth, Death and the Limits of Life: Caesarean Section
in Medieval and Renaissance Europe”. Prior to the sixteenth century, caesareans
were performed exclusively on women who were already dead or deemed unable to
survive labor. Dr. Park used church declarations and legal documents from the
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries to demonstrate how the fate of unborn
children was linked to greater religious and legal considerations. Due to the
belief that unbaptized infants were doomed to suffer in the afterlife, parents
and religious leaders began to stretch the limits of “life” to save the souls
of unborn, stillborn and miscarried children. Their bodies were routinely
scrutinized for the slightest signs of life so they could be baptized in haste
and offered a Christian burial. To this end French midwives received emergency
baptism training. Tellingly, most of the surviving documentation regarding
caesareans in this era comes from legal records. If a child survived for even
the briefest moment, a widowed husband was entitled to his wife’s inheritance.
The absence of a living child meant that the woman’s dowry and her property
would automatically revert to her family. Here again the standards for what it
meant to have life were often stretched until the legal and religious
definitions of life were almost indistinguishable from one another.
Shannon
Withycombe (University of Wisconsin-Madison) offered a related paper on
miscarriage and notions of death in nineteenth century America. Withycombe used
medical journals and the personal letters of women to analyze differing
perceptions of fetal death. While physicians tended to use words like dead,
death and dying when referencing a miscarriage, women seemed to be more
hesitant to describe the experience as a physical death. The idea of fetal life
is a modern understanding. Nineteenth century women, sometimes most profoundly,
felt the loss of a possibility rather than a life. Neither doctors nor mothers
viewed the miscarried material as a corpse. Families did not engage in a formal
mourning process and typically passed the fetus to the physician for assessment
or experimentation.
Jessica
Martucci (University of Pennsylvania) discussed infant feeding and motherhood
in post-World War Two America. Between 1945 and 1980 mounting scientific
evidence indicated that breast feeding was nutritionally superior to bottle
feeding, but American mothers were hesitant to nurse their babies. Martucci
presented a fascinating exploration of factors – the sexualization of the
breast, the need to simultaneously tend to the father’s sexual needs and the
child’s physical needs, the presumed effects of breast feeding on the woman’s
figure – that made nursing appear to be at odds with the demands of
sustaining a modern, happy family.
Other papers
presented at the conference that may be of interest to SHCY members included Joy Newman’s (University at Albany)
exploration of youth drinking and drinking law debates in the 1950s and 1960s;
Debra Blumenthal’s (University of California – Santa Barbara) discussion
on the legal authority of wet nurses and midwives in paternity and legal age
cases in fifteenth century Valencia; Deborah Doroshow’s (Yale University and
Harvard Medical School) work on bedwetting and behavioral conditioning in
mid-twentieth century America; Lisa Pruitt’s (Middle Tennessee State
University) analysis of children’s experiences with disability since the
mid-nineteenth century; and, finally, Wendy Mitchinson’s (University of
Waterloo) discussion of childhood obesity in Canada from 1920-1980.
Children and War, Philadelphia, PA and Camden, NJ, April 3-5, 2009
Patrick Cox, Rutgers University, Camden
The Department of Childhood Studies
(Rutgers-Camden) hosted the
Children and War Conference in April. This gathering of scholars was a truly
interdisciplinary event. Those who presented papers came from a broad range of
disciplines and represented various methodologies and from their various papers
several common themes emerged.
Some scholars historicized children and war,
including David Rosen (Farleigh Dickinson University). Rosen traced a
shift in representations of child soldiers in popular discourse over the past
two centuries from loyal citizens and patriots to a “lost generation.” This
shift entailed a change in perception from childhood as agentic to childhood as
powerless victimization, and also parallels the abandonment of the use of child
soldiers in Western armies and the emergence of “the child soldier” as a social
problem endemic to developing countries. Margaret Higonnet (University of Connecticut) examined
memoirs and diaries and found children played roles in military service during
World War I with surprising frequency. She used girl-soldiers as the
paradigmatic example of the mobilization of children in wartime to call for a
rethinking of the role of children and childhood in the shaping of war culture
and our understanding of childhood itself. Higonnet’s examination of gender
identity formation in the extreme circumstances of war offers possibilities for
further development of our thinking on childhood. James Marten (Marquette University) drew on his research into the American Civil War to
describe children’s agency in actively seeking ways to participate in war. He
used the peculiar and chaotic situation of armed conflict as a window to
provide unique and enlightening perspectives on family dynamics, child rearing
and childhood.
Other scholars conducted ethnographies of
children in armed conflict, beginning with keynote speaker Ismael Beah,
former child soldier and author of A Long Way Gone. He spoke movingly of
his own experiences as a child soldier and his path to becoming an advocate for
child soldiers. He has worked on
their behalf at UNICEF, Human Rights Watch, and the United Nations Secretary
General’s Office for Children and Armed Conflict at the United Nations General
Assembly. Jason Hart (University of Oxford) reported his findings on the
day-to-day experiences of children living in the Occupied Palestinian
Territories. Hart examined what he called “checkpoint education,” the
cumulative effect of daily encounters between armed Israeli soldiers and
Palestinian children. This study calls into question the efficacy of peace and
human rights education in shaping children’s political dispositions in places
where children must undergo the humiliation of passing through armed
checkpoints going to and from school. Gillian Mann (London School of
Political Science and Economics) has conducted extensive ethnographic research
in Dar es Salaam. She reported on undocumented Congolese refugee children and
the psychosocial impact of their clandestine and impoverished lives in Dar es
Salaam. Lacey Gale, of Tufts University, drew upon 15 months of
ethnographic fieldwork among child refugees in post-war Sierra Leone in
describing informal child fostering during war and post-war reconstruction. Her
research described the active role children play in relationships with
caregivers and the responsibilities children take on for their families.
Thoughts on the psychosocial effects of armed
conflict on children were delivered from varying disciplinary perspectives. Paul
Geltman, MD and Professor of Pediatrics at Boston University, assessed
mental health counseling and other health services of Sudanese refugee minors
in foster care in the US. His study found that refugee minors received high
levels of psychosocial support, but neither those with lower functional health
nor those demonstrating post-traumatic stress disorder were more likely to
receive mental health counseling than their peers, suggesting an unmet need for
mental health diagnostic and treatment services. Dorothy Morgo (Yale)
reported on her efforts to assess psychosocial effects of living in armed
conflict on children in Sudan. The research team used multiple and unique forms
of assessment to uncover widespread post-traumatic stress disorder, depression
and grief among Sudanese children. They also identified the 16 war experiences
that proved to be most predicative of traumatic reactions, and delved further
into the complex mechanisms of the interactions of the three disorders. Joseph
Rikhof (University of Ottawa) brought his expertise as Senior Counsel in
the Canadian Crimes Against Humanities and War Crimes Section to the question
of the legal status of former child soldiers. Because child soldiers are minors
who are sometimes compelled into military service and do not always fully
comprehend their own actions, child soldiers pose unique difficulties when
determining responsibility for war crimes. Rikhof suggested these circumstances make child soldiers
unsuitable for legal punishments given to adult war criminals. He explored the
dilemma of punishment for children in war in both a historical context and in
the context of his own experience in the Canadian government dealing with child
soldiers. Richard Williams, Professor of Mental Health Strategy at the
University of Glamorgan and child and adolescent psychiatrist, spoke on
psychosocial resilience of children and families involved in armed conflict in
the face of post-traumatic stress disorder.
Others spoke on the role of international
organizations in working with children both during and after armed conflict. Neil
Boothby, child psychologist and Professor of Public Health at Columbia
University, spoke on the need among humanitarian workers to provide rapid
responses to the immediate needs of children in emergency situations stemming
from armed conflict. These necessarily immediate actions often result in
palliative measures, which frequently provide little long term protection. He
dwelt on the paradox humanitarian workers face in attempting to address
immediate needs of discrete groups of children in emergency situations while at
the same time strengthening protection for all children. Second keynote speaker Michael Wessells (Columbia University) reported on the failure of
reintegration programs to recognize the gendered roles and experiences of girl
soldiers. Girl soldiers’ entry into and experience with armed conflict takes
different forms from their boy soldier counterparts, they are affected
differently by their different experiences, and their integration back into
civilian society is influenced differently. Yet disarmament, demobilization and
reintegration efforts have ignored these differences. Siobhan McEvoy-Levy (Butler University) began with children as agentic in war, post-war violence,
and war and post-war economies, but found both an assumption of, and a desire
for, the suppression of that agency when armed conflict ends. The tasks of
peacekeeping and rebuilding exclude children from discourses on rights,
security and development. McEvoy-Levy drew on a number of case studies to argue
for a productive role for children in peace building.
Others dwelt upon the representations of war
and childhood in popular culture. Kimberley Reynolds (University if
Newcastle) examined both up-market and populist magazines for boys in the
decades leading up to World War I. Previous scholarship has suggested that such
publications contributed to a mythos of war as romantic and heroic, thereby
contributing to boys’ desires to enlist. She discovered attitudes toward armed
conflict and the military as set forth in these publications were much more
subtle and multi-faceted than previous research has suggested. Gary Cross,
historian from Penn State, spoke on the development of war toys in the 20th century. Looking at images of toys and toy advertisements, Cross related
changes in the design and use of war toys to shifts in adult attitudes to war. Timothy
Shary (University of Oklahoma) examined how a particular sub-genre of
films, American teen war movies produced in the 1980’s, exploited Cold War
fears and patriotism in their depictions of fictional teens rising to defend
the nation and traditional values from outside forces. Adrienne Kertzer (University of Calgary) offered a comparison of the Young Adult novel The
Book Thief by Marcus Zusak, about a child growing up in the midst of World
War II, and recent memoirs of similar experiences. Kertzer examined changes in
the representation of the Holocaust as fictional accounts necessarily replace
first-person testimonials as more and more child survivors die.
Charles Watters, Director of the European Centre for the Study of Migration and
Social Care, University of Kent, offered closing remarks and observed several themes
that emerged from the presentations. Among these were a historical perspective
on the emergence of a new form of total war different from a professional war,
and the emergence of a new form of childhood resultant from that new form of
war. Watters was also stuck by the diversity of methodologies represented, and
by the frequent synthesis of qualitative and quantitative data. Much of the
research struck Watters as research that can bring about change, that matters
and that is contextualized in reality.
Omohundro Institute for Early American
History 15th Annual Conference
June, 2009, Salt Lake City, Utah
Rebecca de Schweinitz, Brigham Young
University
In June, the Omohundro Institute for Early
American History 15th Annual Conference, held in Salt Lake City,
Utah, included a panel entitled: Testing the Boundaries: Youth and Authority in Early America.
In her paper, “’To Venture a Little Further:’
Freedom, Danger, and Young Female Pedestrians in the Eighteenth-Century City,
Katherine Gray drew on the dairies of elite, white, young women in Philadelphia
to argue that young women used city streets to both challenge (to some degree)
and reinforce their class and gender identity. They may have even, she suggests, used their walks about
town to assert autonomy and define themselves as individuals.
SHCY member Caroline Cox’s paper, “Boy
Soldiers: Citizenship and Patriarchy in the American Revolution,” used the
stories of Revolutionary War boy soldiers to suggest that military service in
this period did not, as others have argued, necessarily correspond with
increasing independence. Neither did it fit neatly with an earlier history of
military service by boys under the age of sixteen. Military service became more common, she argues, for a
number of reasons—including the increasing familiarity of military
service as the war progressed, family networks, short service options, and
rising bounty payments. Cox’s paper reminds scholars to consider boy soldiers
on their own terms; and it turns out that the boys themselves stress their dependent status rather than their
independence.
And in the last paper, “Working Children and
their Parents in Rural New England,” Gloria Main traced broad demographic,
economic, and social changes—showing that a peculiar set of circumstances
led southern New England to build a market-capitalist industrial economy as
reliant on child labor as colonial-era farming families had been. In some
places children made up 71% of the labor force and contributed 53% of a families’
wages . . . but with the big
difference that the young people who worked in the region’s new factories had
few opportunities (because of a limited tax base for schools and dead-end,
unskilled jobs) to better their lot in life.
Expanding Literacy Studies:
An International, Interdisciplinary
Conference for Graduate Students
The Ohio State University, April 3-5, 2009
Shawn Casey, Ohio State University
The Expanding Literacy Studies conference
drew nearly 250 participants from over 66 institutions and 6 international
sites to the Ohio State University in April. The interdisciplinary conference featured research on
literacy, children and youth in presentations by graduate students in departments
as diverse as Art History, English, Teaching and Learning, Near Eastern
Languages and Cultures, Design, Library Science, and New Media Studies. The
wide range of participants and interests evident in the program reflected the
conference's aim: To expand the conversation about literacy's disciplinary
boundaries and to create a space where graduate students share research and
insight into all aspects of literacy.
In addition to panels and presentations, the
conference featured several dissertation workshops where graduate students
shared dissertation chapters for peer response. Topics addressed included
intergenerational educational literacies, students’ experiences with writing assessment,
and literacy skill building with videoconferencing in kindergarten.
Dissertation workshops were followed by participatory roundtable sessions
designed to fulfill the conference directive to “extend the dialogue” of
literacy studies across disciplines. Roundtables included a demonstration of
“drama as pedagogy” and a discussion of religion in the writing classroom. The
conference closed with interactive workshops that allowed participants to
interact with one another while exploring new technologies for literacy
learning, new approaches to studying literacy in the classroom, and an
arts-based approach to imagining the “Field and Future of Literacy Studies”
with participatory design pioneer Liz Sanders.
The keynote panels, consisting of three
graduate students and a noted scholar in the field, connected new research in
literacy studies to work by leading scholars Harvey J. Graff and Shirley Brice
Heath. Patrick Berry (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) spoke as part
of Harvey J. Graff's Keynote Panel celebrating the 30th anniversary of Graff's The Literacy Myth. Berry presented
research on the literacy narratives of educators. He suggested that teachers’
memoirs reveal the tension between personal investment in literacy “myths” and
the possibility of forming critical approaches to literacy in education. Maria
Bibbs (University of Wisconsin at Madison) explored the origins of the African
American literacy myth. And David Olafsson (University of St. Andrews, Scotland) analyzed the function
of post-print scribal culture in the context of some of the legacies and myths
of literacy.
The keynote panel with Shirley Brice Heath
featured three students working in the tradition of sociolinguistics and
anthropology and focused on questions of “Youth, Language, and Literacy”.
Heather Loyd (University of California, Los Angeles) presented on the role of
cultural literacy skills in the construction and decoding of collaborative
“moral worlds” among children in Naples, Italy. Enid Rosario-Ramos (Northwestern
University) explored intersections between critical literacy and community
among young people attending a Puerto Rican Alternative School. And Darin
Bradley Stockdill (University of Michigan) presented research designed to
engage the purposeful literate practices of youth outside of school in social
studies learning. For more details on the conference, including
the full program, visit the conference web site, www.literacystudies.osu.edu/conference. The site features
an audio archive of the keynote presentations.
Organization of American Historians Annual
Meeting, “History Without Boundaries”
Seattle, Washington, March 2009
Leslie Paris, University of British Columbia
The Organization of American Historians’
annual meeting took place in Seattle this past spring. I organized and presented on a panel
about 1970s childhood, and I was able to attend two other youth-related panels.
Miriam Forman-Brunell, Ilana Nash, Mary McMurray,
and Kelly Schrum led a panel concerning the website which they (and various
other contributors) are collaborately developing, Children and Youth in
History. The site (http://chnm.gmu.edu/cyh/) provides a range of sources and strategies for incorporating the
history of childhood into K-12 and university teaching, whether by
supplementing a survey class with primary childhood texts or by introducing a
new course specifically on children. Already the site offers reviews of other websites whose primary sources
are useful for scholarship on children; annotated primary sources; and various
case studies that model strategies for using primary sources to teach childhood
and youth. Near the end of the
session we broke into small groups to discuss a few primary documents (such as
an ancient Egyptian sock), to consider the process of creating useful
documentation, and to help guide the website’s further development.
The 1970s childhood panel included three
papers. Mine explored the
“child-free” movement of the period, at once a sign of adult liberation ideals,
demographic change, and political activism. Joe Austin suggested that black adolescents in American
central cities often appeared in news reporting in the more loaded guise of
“youth.” Karen Ferguson examined the Ford Foundation’s efforts to steer the
course of racial liberalism through its endorsement of “affective” educational
philosophy in the 1970s. We
appreciated William Graebner’s insightful comments afterwards.
Finally, I attended a “State of the Field”
panel on School Desegregation and White Flight, with Tracy K’Meyer, Kevin
Kruse, Thomas Sugrue, and Brett Gadsden. These papers explored a historiography that has essentially judged the
Supreme Court’s 1956 Brown v. Board of
Ed. decision to have failed as a civil rights measure. The panelists emphasized the
differences between desegregation and integration, explored the range of
oppposition to Brown, and suggested
some of the ways that schools that were officially desegregated often remained
internally segregated along racial lines.
In thinking about these three panels
collectively, I found it striking how differently they spoke to the field of
children’s history and to their somewhat different audiences. At the first
panel, I noted a good number of elementary and secondary teachers in the
audience, as well as scholars working at post-secondary institutions. This panel’s papers were practical in
emphasis; those who stayed for the small group discussions seemed committed to
introducing innovative pedagogy in their classrooms. My own panel drew scholars in children’s history but also
scholars of the 1970s more broadly, many of whose current projects have nothing
to do with youth. The last panel
was the least youth-focused in terms of its audience and its panelists; here
the emphasis was on adult activism and policy, rather than the efforts of
children and youth to desegregate or resegregate their schools. Together, these three panels suggest
the diversity of ways in which childhood and youth matter to American
historical research and teaching.
The Political Child: Children,
Education and the State
15-16 May 2009, University of
Helsinki
Karen Stanbridge, Memorial University
of Newfoundland, Canada
The University of
Helsinki, Finland, was host to a seminar highlighting research exploring the
intersection of children and childhood with the political. The purpose of the
seminar was to bring together historians, historically oriented social scientists
and educators, and cultural scholars working in the field of childhood research
to probe the various ways in which children and childhood are and have been
affected by political processes and structures. The seminar attracted 26
researchers from 10 countries, all keen to discuss their research and create
connections with like-minded scholars. The synergies emerging from our meetings
confirmed the vitality and potential of this area of childhood studies.
The seminar began on 15
May with a welcome to participants from Marjatta
Rahikainen, Professor with the Department of Social Science History,
University of Helsinki, and principal organizer (with Saara Tuomaala) of the
seminar. The afternoon proceeded with several public lectures delivered by
international scholars, including noted childhood historian, Colin Heywood (School of History,
University of Nottingham). Karen Stanbridge of Memorial University
of Newfoundland, Canada (and co-organizer of the seminar) spoke on the neglect
of theories of nationalism to elaborate on childhood in her talk Do Nationalists Have Navels? Where is
Childhood in Mainstream Nationalism Theory? Susanna Hedenborg Malmö University College, Sweden) discussed the
political and historical foundations of the recent growth in popularity of
horse riding and stable work among girls in Sweden in her lecture, Children, Sports, Politics and Stable Work
in Late Twentieth-Century Sweden. Jane Gray (National
University of Ireland at Maynooth) elaborated on her research that reveals state
education in the Irish Republic to be as much a class project as a nationalist
project in Lived Experience, Changing
Childhood and State Formation in Twentieth-Century Ireland. Colin Heywood pondered the changing
relationship between childhood and the political over la longue dureé in his
address, Battles for the Mind: The
History of Children in Politics. The lectures were followed by discussion
and audience response with a panel comprised of the speakers chaired by Saara Tuomaala of the History Department
of the University of Helsinki. Participants then retired to an informal (and
rather lively!) gathering and reception for seminar participants hosted by the
Department of Social Science History, University of Helsinki.
Seminar participants set
to work early (9:30 am) the morning of 16 May discussing the 18 papers
submitted for the workshop portion of the meetings. Although the papers were
mindful of the main themes of the seminar – history, education, the state
– they comprised a wide range of topics, from theoretical explorations
(an analysis of Rousseau’s Emile in
the context of the philosopher’s other writings, for example) to policy
analyses (how state policies toward children in Portugal were shaped by
successive regimes in that country), from micro investigations (of narratives
produced by a classroom of children soon after the Finnish Civil War of 1918)
to more macro and longitudinal perspectives (a comparison of political
representations of children during Swedish elections in the 1950s, 1980s and
2000s). The breadth of interests and the scholarship and creativity evident in
the contributions of seminar participants bodes well for the future of “the
political child.” The seminar wrapped up with a relaxed evening of wine, food,
and conversation hosted by organizer Marjatta Rahikainen – a lovely end
to an absorbing and productive conference.
For a complete list of
seminar participants and titles, please contact Karen Stanbridge, Department of
Sociology, Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada, at kstanbri@mun.ca.
Breaking the Boundaries: A Peer
Reviewed Research Conference on Radical Children's Literature
April 25, 2009, University of British Columbia
Megan Lankford, University of British
Columbia
This one-day
interdisciplinary conference brought together the Department of Language and
Literacy Education, the School of Library, Archival and Information Studies,
the Department of English, the Creative Writing Program at the University of
British Columbia and the Vancouver Children's Literature Roundtable to create a
comprehensive exploration of children's literature. It attracted sixty-five participants.
The conference program
included two keynote speakers, concurrent panel sessions, and a Creative
Writing poster session. Over the four simultaneous panel sessions, the
participants were able to hear twelve papers presented by both current students
and alumni. All papers focused on some aspect of radical children’s literature
ranging from unconventional research in the field to revolutionary narrative
conventions in popular works to the role of cultural authenticity in
multicultural children’s literature. Topics ranged from Bryannie Kirk’s paper
“Death as a Narrator: Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief” to Karen Taylor’s paper
“The Representation of Nature in Vampire Romance for Young Adult Readers: An
Ecocritical Exploration of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight.”
The first keynote speaker,
Dr. Gisele Baxter, began the day with an intriguing discussion of the nature of
children’s literature and more specifically the inherent problems in teen
fiction. In addition to teaching Children’s Literature in the English
Department at UBC, Dr. Baxter focuses her research around the representations
of near-future dystopias in literature, the production and reception of popular
culture, and the gothic inheritance in literature and popular culture. The
afternoon session opened with a keynote presentation by Dr. Eliza Dresang of
the University of Washington. Recently appointed the Beverly Cleary Professor
in Children and Youth Services at UW, Dr. Dresang focused her presentation on
her theory of Radical Change which she explores in her book, “Radical Change:
Books for Youth in a Digital Age” (1999). In this work, Dr. Dresang examines
books that challenge conventional narrative forms while also creating new
spaces for revolutionary literature for children.
Models of
Childhood and their Cultural Consequences, University of Sheffield, United
Kingdom, June 15, 2009
Afua Twum-Danso, University of Sheffield
Introduction
Although the concept of childhood as a social construction is now a familiar concept within the social sciences, the cultural consequences of various social constructions remain an area that has not been sufficiently explored. Thus, on 15th June 2009, the Centre for the Study of Childhood and Youth (CSCY) at the University of Sheffield (UK) organized a one-day international workshop, which aimed to explore the practical consequences of different models of childhood for children themselves. To achieve these aims the workshop focused on three contrasting cultural contexts – Norway, England and Wales and Ghana- and addressed a range of issues such as responsibility, competence, participation and protection. Professor Allison James, the director of CSCY, chaired the workshop, and presentations were delivered by Dr. Anne-Trine Kjǿrholt (Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway), Professor Nigel Thomas (the University of Central Lancashire, UK) and Dr. Afua Twum-Danso (the University of Sheffield, UK).
Childhood in
Scandinavia
As many childhood
researchers believe Scandinavia is an ideal model of childhood due to its focus
on ‘children as being’, not as ‘becoming’, Anne-Trine
Kjǿrholt kicked off the presentations section of the day. While talking
broadly of Scandinavia, most of the case studies she mentioned focused on
Norway, which is predominately a rural country - an important fact when
considering how childhood is perceived within this context. Having said this,
she made a point to stress early on in her presentation that there is not one
model of childhood; instead there are several ways of constituting a good
childhood in Norway and in Scandinavia more generally. Another key point raised
in this presentation was that as Scandinavia has become known for the strong
emphasis it places on children’s rights, there has emerged a dynamic connection
between the model of childhood and the way children’s rights are interpreted.
This can partly be attributed to the political environment in Norway, which is
a social democracy where everyone is seen as being equal – hence the
recognition of children as already ‘being’, rather than as ‘becoming’. Thus,
this illustrates how local cultural models of childhood influence how rights
for this group are interpreted.
To demonstrate how the
emphasis on children’s rights has influenced the perception of children in
Norway, Kjǿrholt put forward two case studies. The first focused on a
project that was undertaken in the early 1990s, which sought to highlight
children’s own culture and demonstrate the ways in which children are different
from adults while at the same time highlighting that children are rights
claimers in the same way adults are. The second case study was a project, which
focused on children as fellow citizens in a kindergarten. Within this sphere of
their lives, children were given the freedom to do what they wanted when they
wanted. This meant that children were allowed to decide when they were ready to
change their nappies and inform adults. Children were also able to eat when
they were hungry rather than being made to eat at specific times of the day.
Since 2005 the idea of
children as participants has become dominant in various spheres. The
Kindergarten Act, for example, stipulates that children’s views should be
sought in the way kindergartens are constructed. Thus, children are often
consulted in the design of their kindergartens. As children are seen as
responsible for their own learning, many kindergartens hold children’s meetings
everyday to find out which group children want to participate in for that day.
Therefore, freedom and self-determination have become overarching moral values
in the current discourse on childhood in Norway and Scandinavia more generally.
However, in concluding her
presentation, Kjǿrholt argued that things are changing somewhat. An
example she offered to highlight this point was the fact that many early
childhood education institutions are moving from a play-oriented curriculum to
a more subject-oriented one. Whereas previously the emphasis had been on free
play and children being responsible for their own learning, there is now an
increasing focus on more constructed learning for children. Thus, currently we
are witnessing significant change as well as continuity in the discourse on
childhood in Scandinavia.
Childhood in
England and Wales
The second presentation, delivered by Nigel Thomas, also sought to stress that although there is a tendency to focus on the dominant discourse on childhood, what is dominant is not dominant in all places. Hence, it is not possible to talk of one model of childhood. Instead, there are competing discourses on childhood. For example, the various discourses in England and Wales tend to focus on children as either angels or devils, further emphasing the fact that there is not one model of childhood. Furthermore, models and discourses on childhood are influenced by variables such as culture and class, which means that society perceives children of the underclass very differently from those from more affluent families.
Having established the diversity in models of childhood, Thomas went on to focus the remainder of his presentation on the key themes identified for the workshop – participation, responsibility and protection. With regards to children’s participation, he argued that although there has emerged a discourse that children are competent beings who can engage in dialogue, which has led to a growth in participatory activities in recent years, children’s opportunities for decision-making are highly variable. At home many children have a significant number of opportunities, but within their local communities they have very few. Within the school environment in particular, children are viewed as objects and, therefore, they have very little autonomy in schools except at break time. In more public spaces, children and young people are seen as a threat and thus they have very few opportunities to organize themselves into groups. This can partly be attributed to the feeling that children should not be seen outside the home, school or some other institution. The participatory activities that have been initiated in other spheres of children’s lives have been mainly initiated by adults and are often very divorced from children’s daily lives. In addition many of these activities are about young people rather than children per se.
With regards to
responsibility, Thomas argued that children benefit from low levels of trust
and high levels of accountability. Hence, it is seen as inappropriate when
children are left to their own devices. In addition, children are not seen as
having duties – not in terms of having duties to their families –
but they are seen as having a duty to work hard at school. In relation to
competence, children are, on the whole, seen as incompetent because they do not
have sufficient knowledge to contribute to the world. As a result, they need
close supervision, which also has an impact on the low levels of responsibility
granted to children.
In terms of protection,
Thomas suggested that children in England and Wales are well protected. Child
deaths are relatively few. Legally, children can be beaten only by their
parents who are restricted in various ways in their punishment of their
children. Children are not allowed to go anywhere without adult supervision,
which makes it harder to organize participation in any formal way. This may
partly be the reason why many participatory activities focus on young people
instead of children. There is also increasing prohibition on touching, which
impedes the relationship between adults and children and also prevents children
receiving comfort from adults when they need it. Thus, to conclude Thomas
suggested that England and Wales are increasingly becoming societies where
children are heard and not seen and certainly not touched, which has
implications for the realization of their rights.
Childhood in
Ghana
Afua Twum-Danso ended the morning session with her presentation on the construction of childhood in Ghana and the implications of this construction on the way childhood competence is perceived. By focusing on children’s responsibilities within their families and communities and the lack of opportunities for participation in decision-making within these spheres, she argued that while children are perceived as sufficiently competent to engage in labour, they are not competent to participate in other areas of family or community life such as decision-making. This attitude was summed up by a participant in one of the focus group discussions she organised during her PhD fieldwork in Ghana who said: ”Children are born to work, not participate in decision-making.” As a result of this attitude, children assist their parents in all tasks that will be expected of them as adults – be they in the household, on the farm or at sea. Children themselves identified their responsibilities as running errands for parents and other adults, contributing to the maintenance of the household by sweeping the compound and its interior, washing utensils, helping mother to cook, looking after younger siblings. Although these activities demonstrate that children are competent to engage in various types of labour, Twum-Danso argued that they are not perceived as being competent enough to participate in other areas of family life such as decision-making and expressing their opinions even on issues affecting them. In fact, those children who do express their views or show signs of assertiveness are often seen as social deviants, disrespectful and hence are punished. Many children also felt that they did not need to participate in decision-making and some also expressed their disapproval of those children who are able to express their views as it is thought they are spoilt and hence, are not trained properly in the values of society.
To understand this double standard relating to children’s
competence, Twum-Danso argued that we must explore the various ways childhood
is constructed and defined in this cultural context. During her research in Ghana she identified five components
of the childhood and child-rearing process, which limit children’s
participation in decision-making, but facilitate the concept of children’s
duties towards their families and communities. These included dependency, ’having sense’, obedience
and respect. By focusing on these factors Twum-Danso was able to show that in
the construction of childhood within this context, emphasis is placed on
children’s duties and responsibilities while their potential contributions to
other areas of family and community life are overlooked or dismissed.
Therefore, in her conclusion, Twum-Danso stated that childhood is perceived as
a period of incompetence, if not in terms of children’s ability to work and
contribute to the functions of the household, then at least in terms of
children being seen as immature, lacking sense, and not having anything
valuable to contribute to their families and communities. This perception of children has
consequences for the realisation of their rights within this cultural context.
Creating a
Space for Participants’ Reflection and Dialogue
The afternoon session was structured to enable all participants to
reflect and engage in dialogue on the issues raised in the presentations of the
morning session. To this end, participants were divided into three groups, each
charged with examining one of the key focus themes–
responsibility/competence, participation and protection. Each group was then
expected to present the key points raised during their discussions in the
plenary session.
When giving feedback to the plenary, the group which focused on
protection, highlighted the following points. Drawing largely on the UK context, they suggested that professionals are increasingly taking
away parental rights. The parent-child relationship has now become about parents,
children and also professionals rather than just about parents and children.
Part of the reason for this is the fact that children are often constructed as
victims, which reinforces the emphasis on protectionism. Instead, this group
suggested that if children were seen more as participants, child victims might
be able to help protect themselves. Another issue that emerged in this group
was the idea that children are often given the freedom to choose as long as
they make the "right" choice. Therefore, children’s participation and
agency is often constrained, reinforcing the importance of structure in the
discourse on childhood.
In their feedback to the plenary, the participation group, noted
that there was a danger of dichotomising participation. This is because there
is not one type of participation and what participation is often depends on
context. Key questions they asked were: what is participation for? What types
of participation exist? Whose agenda dominates in participatory initiatives?
What impact do children have when they participate? And how can we make
participation more representative and more meaningful?
The final group which had explored two concepts in tandem -
responsibility and competence - stressed the following points during their feedback to the plenary.
Children have to take on responsibility, but adults have to yield that
responsibility. With regard to competence this group felt that there are
different types of competence and how a particular competency is privileged
depends on the cultural context. This group also put forward a number of points
about participation. They argued that it is critical for us to foreground
context as participation is different in different contexts – an obvious
but often overlooked point. Thus, the key question for us to explore is: how
can we take into account different contexts in our theorising of participation?
After these group presentations, a wider group discussion followed
in which a number of participants expressed the view that we need a more holistic
approach to researching childhood. In particular, it was felt that we need to
place childhood in a broader context as we cannot transport models of childhood
from one context to another. Context is key as the models of childhood presented in the three case
studies existed/emerged because of the particularities of their political,
social and cultural contexts. In
addition, relationality was also seen as important for understanding models of
childhood as they can only be understood if we understand the models of
adulthood that exist in any particular context. Finally, with regard to
participation, it was felt that there is a need to explore very different
notions of participation and expand it beyond just ’having a say’.
The day concluded with all
participants agreeing that they would welcome another day to explore these
issues in greater depth through presentations, as well as dialogue, amongst
participants.
For more details about this workshop or any future workshops at
the Centre for the Study of Childhood and Youth please visit the following
website: www.sheffield.ac.uk/cscy
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