CIESPI at PUC-Rio University has just published in Research and Policy Bulletin no. 6, 2019, its latest work on children and youth participation in decisions that impact their lives. The bulletin, titled Contrasts: children and the city: methods for listening and participation, is now available on the CIESPI website. The bulletin is part of a long-time project with our colleagues at Østfold University College, Norway led by professor Trond Heitmann, to explore this crucial area. CIESPI is also conducting projects on this topic with other international partners. Our Norwegian colleagues are also engaged in the process of implementing the project in Norway.
With the starting observation that many children in their daily lives are steered to explore places that are considered most protected, the team pointed out that children often miss interactions in places that favor diversity. CIESPI researchers building on their earlier work in Brazil and Argentina worked with public and private schools and a creche in Rio to get children to talk about their perceptions of their cities. One tool, developed by CIESPI, was the use of silhouettes of photographs of children which obscured any contextual information thus permitting the children in the project to discuss, design and draw the context they thought the children in the silhouettes inhabited. The silhouettes were of photographs taken for a photo exhibit mounted by CIESPI and Østfold University College colleagues in 2015 titled Children in Rio de Janeiro: Contrasts, organized to illustrate the different lives of children in Rio particularly the different lives of low-income children and better-off children.
The project described in Research and Policy Bulletin 6 involved about 560 children between the ages of six months and thirteen years. In addition to drawing on the silhouettes, the children told stories and participated in exhibitions where their drawings and narratives were displayed. These productions were then discussed in meetings in which the children, school staff and researchers took part. The authors point out that the dialectical space provided by such interactions is guided by an ethical point of view which recognizes cultural and identity pluralities and contributes to the formation of people and creators in solidarity in their relationships to themselves, with others and the world. This point of view also demands that such understandings could and should inform policy debates and decisions about children and youth.