Children researching their everyday lives, education and relationships during the coronavirus pandemic (CHEER) by Professor Helen Lomax and Dr Kate Smith, University of Huddersfield.
CHEER was undertaken during the 2020-2021 global pandemic in collaboration with 16 children aged 9-11, teachers and parents from four primary schools in the north of England. The project aimed to enable children from diverse socio-cultural contexts to express their experiences of living in a pandemic and the impacts of government policies on their lives during this time. Working participatively with children, we developed creative arts-based activities to enable children to participate in ways of their choosing, meeting with children individually and in small groups online to make art together and to talk about their experiences. We scaffolded the arts-based activities across the project and the participating children produced over one hundred visual and textual data and twenty hours of in-depth photo elicitation interviews, along with a series of self-portraits and an animation establishing key messages for adults and other children about the ongoing pandemic and the impact of nationally and regionally tiered restrictions on children’s everyday lives.
Click the link to see the wonderfully thought provoking animation –