Arts-Based Methods for Research with Children

"Flying soccer balls that are ice-cream factories inside, cars with wings, mobile recycling plants, streets that are rivers. These are the inventions children have offered up to Hickey-Moody. This is because she deftly uses arts-based methodologies to provide resources for engaging with children and communities to examine social issues such as belonging, community cohesion, faith and attachment. This book will appeal to those who wish to work with arts practices to explore similar themes in complex social circumstances, either as 'research' or as 'community engagement.' Hickey-Moody is an international leader in arts-based methodologies, if you're interested in how to do them well--you should read this book." --Mary Lou Rasmussen, Professor in the College of Arts & Sciences, Australian National University This book offers a practical, methodological guide to conducting arts-based research with children by drawing on five years of the authors' experience carrying out arts-based research with children in Australia and the UK. Based on the Australian Research Council-funded Interfaith Childhoods project, the authors describe methods of engaging communities and making data with children that foreground children's experiences and worldviews through making, being with, and viewing art. Framing these methods of doing, seeing, being, and believing through art as modes of understanding children's strategies for negotiating personal identities and values, this book explores the value of arts-based research as a means of obtaining complex information about children's life worlds that can be difficult to express verbally.