About the project
The Children’s Photography Archive (CPA beta) is the first archive in the world of its kind, featuring the photographs of child photographers. The project tests the scaling up of the CPA for the creation of evidence-based and openly accessible methodologies and learning resources for a child-authored, multimodal citizenship curriculum in primary schools. The social innovation grows out of our ERC-funded research (the ‘CONNECTORS STUDY’) on the relationship between childhood and public life with six- to eight-year olds that demonstrated how children connect to and produce rich multimodal stories (using text, image, sound) about their experiences of public life. The project will also create and make sustainable the first-ever Children’s Photography Archive 2.0 (CPA 2.0) for citizenship education that provides educators and pupils methodologies and tools for a child-authored, multimodal citizenship education. The project seeks to (1) address the challenges faced by teachers in delivering citizenship education; (2) develop adult/educator capabilities for understanding children’s visual communication in relation to citizenship; (3) provide an infrastructure to support and recognise children’s visual communication. The CPA 2.0 will innovate on citizenship education by offering multimodal content and methodology created by and designed with children and teachers, and will test the scaling up of the CPA for child-authored, multimodal citizenship education in real-world settings, at the same time as providing a platform for children photographers to display their work and increase public understanding of children’s photographic forms of expression. There is an urgency to this project as we enter a critical time for Europe’s future. As such, geographically located at the edges of Europe (Greece, United Kingdom), this project will yield complex and emerging multimodal stories of what it means to grown up ‘European’ which will serve educational and cultural purposes.
The project was delivered in two phases:
‘Children’s Photo-Stories of Citizenship’: Creating child-designed and multimodal educational resources for citizenship teaching in primary schools.
In phase one we developed educational materials for the teaching of citizenship in primary schools in the form of the ‘Let’s Talk About…‘ pack of cards which are evidence-informed and intended for the training of teachers tasked with PSHE and citizenship curricular delivery in primary schools and the first few years of secondary school. The cards are also intended to stimulate discussion amongst students. There are very few resources available for teaching citizenship education in schools, and none that are created by children for children. Separately to this pack of cards, and in collaboration with the Athens Directorate for Primary School Education (Environmental Education Division) and the Department for Early Years Education at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, we trained 15 nursery and primary school educators in Athens, Greece, during the pandemic (winter 2020-2021) to use an ethnographic visual method that we devised on the Connectors Study (photo-stories) in the classroom for citizenship education. The project resulted in 237 children aged 5 to 12 engaging in the process of photo-storying about things that are important to them.
Dragonas, T., Nolas, S-M., Dimopoulou, M. Kyrdi, K. and Varvantakis, C. (under review) ‘Από τηνφωτογράφιση στην πολιτειότητα’ (From photography to citizenship). In Filia Isari and Marios Pourkos (eds) Qualitative Visual Methods in Greece.
Children’s Photography Archive: Setting up a functioning archive where children can submit their photos.
In phase two of the project we established the Children’s Photography Archive (CPA) as an not-for-profit and began devising the digital archival infrastructure, as well as the ethics and values underpinning it, that can receive photographic submissions from children photographers, and projects working with children and photography. In July 2021, the Children’s Photography Archive (CPA) was incorporated as a community interest company in England and Wales.
Project team
Melissa Nolas is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London. She is the co-Director of the Childhood Publics Research Programme and the Children’s Photography Archive and the co-editor of the online journal entanglements: experiments in multimodal ethnography. Her research interests are in human agency and everyday life; childhood, youth and family lives; women’s health; social and economic change; civic and political practices across the life course; multimodal ethnography and creative research methods; archives and photography; publics creating methodologies.
Christos Varvantakis is an anthropologist working at Goldsmiths, University of London in the Department of Sociology. She is the co-Director of the Childhood Publics Research Programme and the Children’s Photography Archive and the co-editor of the online journal entanglements: experiments in multimodal ethnography. His research interests are in the intersections of childhood and public life; politics and urban environments; visual and multimodal research methodologies; ethnographic cinema; archives and photography.
Gabriella Giannachi, FRSA, MAE, is Professor in Performance and New Media, and Director of the Centre for Intermedia and Creative Technologies at the University of Exeter. Her research interest are in art and technology; mobile interpretation and user-generated documentation of art and sport events; the creation, exhibition, and sharing of archival resources within an exhibition context; mixed, augmented and virtual reality; presence research; museum studies and digital curation; new media and digital curation; oral history and digital heritage; creative technologies and public humanities. Gabriella is advising Melissa and Christos on the set up on the Children’s Photography Archive.
Johannes Schöning is Professor of Human-Computer Interaction, University of Bremen, the co-director of the Bremen Spatial Cognition Center (BSCC) and a member of the TZI (Technologie-Zentrum Informatik und Informationstechnik). His research interests lie at the intersection of (HCI), geographic information science and ubiquitous interface technologies. In his HCI lab he and his colleagues investigate how people interact with digital spatial information and create new methods and novel interfaces to help people interact with spatial information. This includes the development and evaluation of wearable technologies, mobile augmented reality and virtual reality applications, interactive surfaces and tabletops, and other “post desktop” interfaces.
The team are supported by an interdisciplinary reference group:
- Alice Corble, Sociologist of Libraries and Librarian/Academic Services Supervisor, University of Sussex
- Catherine Fehily, Head of College, CIT Crawford College of Art and Design
- Elsa Guily, Artist and Doctoral Student, Universität der Künste Berlin
Vangelis Karamanolakis, co-director of ASKI Contemporary Social History Archives and Assistant Professor of Theory and History of Historiography, National and Kapodistrian University of AthensPenelope Petsini, Photographer and Post-Doctoral Researcher, Department of Political Science and History,Panteion UniversityAnnebella Pollen, Principal Lecturer in the History of Art and Design, Brighton UniversityCatherine Sloan, Career Development Fellow, University of Oxford
Information sheets
We have created an information sheet for members of the public who are approached by children participating in the ‘Children’s Photo-Stories of Citizenship’ project and the Children’s Photography Archive. Click on the link below for more information about what it means to have your image included in the project and how you can withdraw your image.
Funder
European Research Council (ERC-PoC-874454).
