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Arts-Based Methods
for Research
with Children
Anna Hickey-Moody
Christine Horn
Marissa Willcox
Eloise Florence
Studies in Childhood and Youth

Series Editors
Afua Twum-Danso Imoh
University of Sheffield
Sheffield, UK

Nigel Thomas
University of Central Lancashire
Preston, UK

Spyros Spyrou
European University Cyprus
Nicosia, Cyprus

Penny Curtis
University of Sheffield
Sheffield, UK
This well-established series embraces global and multi-disciplinary schol-
arship on childhood and youth as social, historical, cultural and material
phenomena. With the rapid expansion of childhood and youth studies
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hoods and youth in space, place and time. We are particularly keen to
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rary global challenges. Studies in Childhood and Youth will be of interest
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Anna Hickey-Moody · Christine Horn ·
Marissa Willcox · Eloise Florence

Arts-Based Methods
for Research
with Children
Anna Hickey-Moody Christine Horn
School of Media & Communication School of Media & Communication
RMIT University RMIT University
Melbourne, VIC, Australia Melbourne, VIC, Australia

Marissa Willcox Eloise Florence

School of Media & Communication School of Media & Communication
RMIT University RMIT University
Melbourne, VIC, Australia Melbourne, VIC, Australia

Studies in Childhood and Youth

ISBN 978-3-030-68059-6 ISBN 978-3-030-68060-2 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-68060-2

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To the children, teachers, parents and religious leaders that made this work
not only possible, but invigorating, inspiring and enjoyable. We thank you.
 Acknowledgments

We acknowledge the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nations, on which

this writing was made. We pay our respects and give our gratitude to the
elders of the community, both past present and emerging, as they let us
live and conduct this work here in these unceded lands. We also would
like to acknowledge the support of our RMIT University community and
colleagues, our friends and family and the people who helped us write
this. Special thanks to all the amazing children whose stories feature in
this book. Thank you.

vii
 Contents

1 Introduction 1
Introduction 1
Arts-Based Approaches to Working with Children 3
The Child Artist in Art Brut 4
Arts-Based Methods in Practice: Interfaith Childhoods 7
Chapter Outlines 8
Conclusion 11
References 12

2 Doing: Arts Workshops as Research with Children 17

Introduction 18
Research and Art-Making with Children 19
Art-Making and Entangled Methodologies 21
Arts Workshops 22
Round One 23
Visual Expression and Identity 23
Values Pictures and Collaboration 29
Future Cities 30
Round Two 32
Refuge Tents 32
Patchwork Quilt—Geographies of Belonging 36
Homework Sheet 41
Round Three 41

ix
x CONTENTS

Conclusion 45
References 46

3 Seeing: Visually Analysing Children’s Art 49

Introduction 50
The Emergence of Child Art 51
Art Brut, Outsider Art and Folk Art 53
Children’s Art and the Institutional Setting 57
Interpreting Children’s Art 58
Children’s Expressive Drawings 60
Children’s Art and Shared Narratives 61
Interpretive Analysis 62
Art, Belonging and Togetherness 63
Values Pictures and Self-Portraits 64
Pictures of Future Cities 68
Conclusion 75
References 76

4 Being: Children’s Ways of Being Through Art 81

Introduction 82
Art in and of Place 82
Representing the More-Than-Human 84
Depicting the Self Within the World 90
Depicting Space and Place 93
Being Children Outside 97
Conclusion 106
References 107

5 Believing: Belief in the Making—The Impacts

of Arts-Based Approaches 111
Introduction 112
Affect and Embodied Ways of Becoming 113
Affect, Art and Trauma 115
Animating Hope 119
A Theory of Change 123
Social Impact 126
Increasing Intercultural Understanding with Arts-Based
Methods 132
 CONTENTS xi

Conclusion 135
References 136

6 Conclusion: Doing, Seeing, Being and Believing

in Arts-Based Research with Children 139
Introduction 139
Why Arts-Based Research? 140
Key Contributions 141
What Next? 144

Correction to: Arts-Based Methods for Research

with Children C1

Index 147
 List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 ‘Surprise’ emotions drawing, primary school in Moss

Side, Manchester, 2018 24
Fig. 2.2 A self-portrait, primary school in Levenshulme,
Manchester, 2018 26
Fig. 2.3 Self-portrait, church group in Adelaide, 2018 27
Fig. 2.4 ‘Tent city’, church group in Adelaide, 2019 35
Fig. 2.5 Fred’s sense of belonging as a quilt square and his written
description of his story of home, London, 2017 37
Fig. 2.6 Asad’s migration story as textile, London, 2017 38
Fig. 2.7 Salma’s geography of belonging as textile, London, 2017 39
Fig. 2.8 Screenshot from Aatika’s identity animation, primary
school in East Melbourne, 2019 42
Fig. 2.9 Screenshot from Le’s identity animation, primary school
in East Melbourne, 2019 43
Fig. 3.1 A picture about identity and belonging, made
for the refuge tents workshop in a primary school
in Rusholme, Manchester, 2018 54
Fig. 3.2 A quilt tile about family, heritage and belonging made
in a religious school in Canberra, 2019 55
Fig. 3.3 A collaborative ‘values picture’, showing plants’
relationship with humans through oxygen, South East
London, 2017 65
Fig. 3.4 A self-portrait, paper and felt-tip pen, drawn by a girl
in a South East London primary school, 2017 66

xiii
xiv LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 3.5 Children collaborate on their future city picture, inner

north Melbourne, 2019 67
Fig. 3.6 A collaborative drawing of a future city based on ‘what
really matters’, Adelaide 2018 69
Fig. 3.7 Collaborative future city, inner north Melbourne, 2019 72
Fig. 3.8 A collaborative picture of ‘what really matters’ in a future
city, Adelaide, 2018 74
Fig. 4.1 A ‘self-portrait’, primary school community centre,
Melbourne, 2018 86
Fig. 4.2 Emotion image, primary school in Levenshulme,
Manchester, 2018 87
Fig. 4.3 A tree, sky, cars and road, mosque in Western Sydney,
2019 89
Fig. 4.4 ‘What really matters’, Manchester art gallery, 2019 90
Fig. 4.5 Emotions picture of ‘lonely’, primary school
in Levenshulme, Manchester, 2018 92
Fig. 4.6 A collaborative artwork from a religious school
in Canberra, depicting a future city containing ‘what
really matters’, 2018 94
Fig. 4.7 A values picture of a house, primary school in East
London, 2018 95
Fig. 4.8 Party house, values picture of a house, primary school
in East London, 2018 96
Fig. 4.9 Children make their way through the forest sculpture
walk created as a primary school in Levenshulme,
Manchester, 2018 100
Fig. 4.10 Richard’s image of ‘what really matters’ and ‘what
makes me feels safe’, primary school in Levenshulme,
Manchester, 2018 104
Fig. 4.11 Jamila describing her identity picture, touching ‘the rain
falling down’, primary school in Rusholme, Manchester,
2019 105
Fig. 5.1 Rezas quilt square of ‘home’, North Melbourne, 2019 116
Fig. 5.2 Animation about ‘what really matters’, East Melbourne,
2019 121
Fig. 5.3 Zara’s animation about identity, hope and harmony,
Manchester, 2019 122
Fig. 5.4 The country of origin of participants in the Interfaith
Childhoods project 125
Fig. 5.5 Educational levels of participants in the Interfaith
Childhoods project 126
 LIST OF FIGURES xv

Fig. 5.6 Age groups among adult participants in the Interfaith

Childhoods project 127
Fig. 5.7 Reported religion of survey respondents 128
Fig. 5.8 Respondents’ answers to the question ‘Do you see
yourself as religious?’ 129
Fig. 5.9 The theory of change of the Interfaith Childhoods
project, developed by Think Impact (2019) 130
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Abstract This chapter introduces the functions and benefits of arts-based

methods for working with children, surveying existing literature and
providing a brief history of approaches to children’s art. It also introduces
the Interfaith Childhoods research project from which the subsequent
chapters draw empirical data to explore ways of doing, seeing, being
and believing in and with children’s art. Arts-based methods make space
for children to be considered as valued sources of research knowledge,
giving voice to children’s lived experiences which may often be diffi-
cult to describe verbally. Valuing children’s art has roots in the art brut
and outsider art movement, where artists saw children as ‘free’ from the
constraints and prejudices of adulthood and the formal art world.

Keywords Arts-based approaches · Children · Art brut · Methods ·

Entanglement

Introduction
Making art is an expansive and accessible method for researching with
children. It provides the space to do, see, be and believe in children’s
real and imagined worlds. This book arises from a large transnational

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2021
A. Hickey-Moody et al., Arts-Based Methods for Research
with Children, Studies in Childhood and Youth,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-68060-2_1
2 A. HICKEY-MOODY ET AL.

research project called Interfaith Childhoods, led by Professor Anna

Hickey-Moody. The project uses a new materialist approach which, when
developed into a set of community arts practices and pedagogies, under-
stands children’s perspectives on the topics of community, belonging,
faith and identity. Since 2016, the project has run across 12 sites in
London, Manchester, Sydney, Adelaide, Melbourne and Canberra. As
a team of dedicated researchers, we work with children, their parents,
carers and teachers to facilitate arts-based methods of exploring faith
and community, to produce a broader narrative about how people feel
they belong. At the time of writing, the research has over 400 partici-
pants and is ongoing. The arts workshops, which we specifically discuss
in this book, are considered a method of community engagement and a
means of making data with children, as children’s experiences and world-
views articulate through their art. Over the three years of research, the
children are engaged in a set of three workshops, followed by commu-
nity focus group discussions with the children’s parents and carers. The
art-making and the focus group discussions explore themes of identity,
community, belonging, social values and religious beliefs. Such methods
offer safe spaces for children to build resilience and confidence, exercise
their agency and engage in powerful methods for expressing themselves
through acts of art-making. It is in this material agency that we see
children’s diverse beliefs, hopes and aspirations emerge. Sharing this
information can facilitate a better understanding of intercultural relations.
This book explores the value of arts-based research with children, as we
demonstrate how art is a means of obtaining complex information about
children’s lifeworlds, while also recognising them as agentic and deserving
of respect. Arts-based methods emerge as a way of exploring identity and
values in this context. The methods developed in the Interfaith Child-
hoods project are a set of resources that can be taken up to extend the
field of arts-based approaches to research with children, but also can be
applied in broader educational or institutional settings. This introductory
chapter offers a brief survey of some sociological, educational and cultural
studies approaches to using arts-based methods in research with children.
Acknowledging the significance of children’s art worlds, we take the
art brut movement as a theoretical foundation via which to approach
making art with children. We write about our methods of doing , seeing ,
being and believing through art, which are new materialist modes of
understanding how young people are entangled with(in) their worlds.
Art, then, becomes more than expression, critique or representation. It is
 1 INTRODUCTION 3

a layered and complex modality which both communicates for and learns
from the artist and the world around it. As a method of communication,
art-making includes those often left out of mainstream narratives, like
children, or those who don’t speak mainstream languages. Through our
methods and analysis, this book offers a guide with which to work with
children and their communities, in ways that are impactful and enjoy-
able for all involved. We hope this book opens up new pathways into
understanding the ways children do, see, be and believe in themselves.

Arts-Based Approaches to Working with Children

Working with children through arts-based practices has been established
as a research methodology (Hickey-Moody 2011, 2013, 2015; Leavy
2015; Thomson 2009) which can examine lived experiences of the child
and the ways children are entangled with education, community and
culture (Cahnmann-Taylor and Siegesmund 2017; Clark 2017; Thomson
and Hall 2019). When put into action, these methods can accentuate
children’s multimodal literacies (Wolfe and Flewitt 2010), allowing them
to express and formulate their sense of self and their relationality in
and of the world. Moving ‘beyond the limiting constraints of discursive
communication in order to express meanings that otherwise would be
ineffable’ (Barone and Eisner 2011, 1), arts-based methods amplify the
voices of those in marginalised communities and can bring greater mate-
rial agency to certain experiences and subjectivities that can be otherwise
difficult to express or represent (Kidd 2009; Nunn 2017). The experi-
ences we refer to are often challenging or traumatic (Coholic et al. 2009;
Hickey-Moody and Willcox 2020a), but they can also encompass bodily
encounters, affect, emotion, material, sensorial and visceral knowledges
that are held outside normative frames and modes of discourse (Lenette
2019). Considered essential in expanding the potentially limited possi-
bilities of the didactic mind (Foster 2016), using art as a research and
communication method also offers an excellent vehicle for communi-
cating across language barriers (Knight et al. 2015; Yohani 2008). In
a research context, arts practices frame children as valuable and agentic
sources of insight. Lenette (2019), for example, in her research with
refugee children, positions informants in arts-based research as ‘Knowl-
edge Holders’ (12), rather than as ‘research subjects’ or ‘participants’.
Lennette draws the term from Canada’s First Peoples, to recognise ‘that
4 A. HICKEY-MOODY ET AL.

the people who hold knowledge of their experiences have agency to artic-
ulate and share these’ (12). Lundy and colleagues (2011) also look to
children as co-researchers, or as active participants in the generation of
knowledge through arts-based research. This includes both experiential,
material, embodied and affective ways of knowing, and the more tradi-
tional forms of ideological knowledge creation, being cultural, political
and discursive. Arts-based methods with children form embodied peda-
gogies (Dixon and Senior 2011) and should be viewed not as ‘a tool
for positivist “data extraction”’ but rather ‘a route to empowerment and
participation’ (Blaisdell et al. 2019, 17).
Imagine being seven years old and being asked to talk to a researcher
in an interview about your home or your religion. Now, how would it
feel instead to draw a picture about where you feel you belong, what
makes you who you are and what you believe in? You are brought mate-
rials and pens, and you make a quilt with your classmates about the things
that matter to you. The differences between an interview and a drawing
for a child are vast. Art opens up imaginative doors into worlds and
interpretations that often cannot be explained through a seven-year-old’s
vocabulary or emotional self-awareness. Because of art’s ability to express
unconscious and emotional aspects of experience, arts-based methods
with children have been studied as ethical forms of engaging with children
who have adverse life experiences (Akesson et al. 2014; Clacherty 2006).
They are necessarily participatory and, as such, can be formulated as a way
of igniting voice in children by affording them agency over their concep-
tualisations of themselves and their worlds (Akesson et al. 2014). This is
particularly useful when working with children affected by trauma experi-
enced as a result of war (Gangi and Barowsky 2009; Hickey-Moody and
Willcox 2020a; Mitchell et al. 2019), forced migration (Bagnoli 2009;
Clacherty 2006; Lenette 2019) or homelessness (Kidd 2009; Hickey-
Moody 2020). By articulating the ‘voice’ expressed through children’s
lived experiences, without reducing or refining this voice to verbal or
written forms, arts-based practices allow for the complex and often diffi-
cult experiences of childhood to be expressed and conceived through
embodied, affective and creative ways.

The Child Artist in Art Brut

Many studies have examined children’s art through visual analysis and
interpretation (Cox 2013; Di Leo 2013) often as a form of art brut or
 1 INTRODUCTION 5

‘outsider art’ (Fineberg 1998). Both of these art movements consider

children as artists, albeit only through positioning them alongside other
‘outsiders’ to the capitalist art world of institutionalised education,
galleries and art markets. Such ‘outsiders’ include the mentally ill, the
disabled, untrained artists and peoples who were at the time called
‘natives’ or ‘tribal people’. The positioning of children alongside these
groups of so-called ‘outsiders’ says much about how children’s voices have
been viewed across history as having little to no importance or agency.
We’ve taken a decolonial approach to this type of research (see Agboka
2014). Our new materialist methodology, working with the child as an
agentic, knowing, being, refutes many mainstream European art move-
ments’ conceptions of legitimate practice and knowledge. Instead, our
approach aims to work with the affective pedagogies children learn as
they position themselves as parts of the more-than-human environment
(Nxumalo and Villanueva 2019).
Famous European and American artists across the twentieth century
including Picasso, Klee, Kandinsky, Pollock and Miro identified the influ-
ence of children’s art (including their own) on their work as a vital source
of imaginative energy. Tracked through the history of art movements
(Piery 2001), children’s art was often approached as ‘pure’, free from
the constraints and prejudices of artistic training, ‘a virgin drawing free
from the imitative will, without slavishly trying to copy his model’ (Piery
2001, 14). Fineberg (1997) suggested that many artists valued children’s
drawings because of their naive spontaneity, their innocence and supposed
absence of the restrictions of adult art, and elevated children’s art—along
with the art of ‘tribal peoples and the mentally diseased’ (Klee in Piery
2001, 15)—above that of ‘adult art’ because of its ‘purity’. This perspec-
tive on children’s art is valuable because it recognises them as artists,
but problematic in the respect that it idolises their work as presenting
this ‘pure’ idea of what Fineberg (1997) identified as the ‘innocent eye’.
It also situates Indigenous people and mentally ill people as being sepa-
rate to ‘adults’, which is a hugely racialising, ableist and oppressive way
of categorising art-makers based on their association within ‘mainstream
art society’ (e.g. White, European, able bodied, largely male, capitalist).
Acknowledging this exclusionary standpoint, we use new and imagina-
tive methods that speak back to mainstream narratives that have typically
excluded certain groups (children, mentally ill, Indigenous people) from
6 A. HICKEY-MOODY ET AL.

mainstream ways of reading and understanding art (Hickey-Moody and

Willcox 2020b).
These approaches to children’s art remain distinctively developmental,
positioning children on a linear progression from child to adult. Murris
(2016) argues that under such Western humanist ontology and episte-
mologies of childhood, the child is ‘the last savage’ (77), the not-quite-
human, not yet formed into a complete adult with rights, agency and
power. By positioning children’s art as ‘pure’ and ‘innocent’, the adult
artist—the mentally stable, Western, often white and male artist—is held
as the ‘transcendental signifier’ (Murris 2016, 77), the figure towards
which children artists are moving and against which they are judged.
The methods we advocate position the child as an artist but not as an
artist-becoming-adult, nor a truth-seer with powers that extend beyond
an adult artist. There is not a comparison or an end point, but a validation
of the child as an artist in their own right with their own experiences and
individual voice.
The Interfaith Childhoods project builds on relational and posthuman
theories of childhood (Malone 2018; Murris 2016) to understand chil-
dren’s art as an assemblage of doing, seeing, being and believing. Chil-
dren are born with the histories of their parents and forebears imprinted
in the matter of their bodies (Haines 2019). Children’s bodies speak
for them, but in this case, also speak of their families’ and their own
inherited histories (Menakem 2017). Through the Interfaith Childhoods
project’s methods, we look at the bodily affects and material expressions
which speak to these past and present histories. Reading the child body,
making together and observing bodily responses is a way of creating space
to recognise subjugated, non-mainstream knowledges. Making art with
culturally and linguistically diverse children and talking to their parents
is an everyday, vernacular, decolonising approach to understanding faith,
identity, community and belonging. Our approach is therefore concerned
with the agency of children’s experience, of how they give value to places,
matter and things. We want to do, see, be and believe in the things that
they find most important. It is in these nuanced accounts of children’s
everyday life that the really rich stories and accounts of experience shine
through.
 1 INTRODUCTION 7

Arts-Based Methods in Practice:

Interfaith Childhoods
This book draws on the expansive empirical data of the Interfaith Child-
hoods project, developed with over 440 participants in 12 fieldwork
sites. Through new materialist arts workshops with children aged 5–
12, we explore how children feel they belong (or do not belong) to
Australia or the UK, and to their religious, ethnic and cultural identi-
ties. Through art-making and focus group conversations with parents,
a complex enmeshment of stories, symbols and styles of attachment
emerges. These data need to be read through bodily experiences of
migration, war, trauma, Othering, but also love, acceptance, intercultural
and interfaith friendships, respect, family, food and more. Our method
acknowledges the centrality and importance of vernacular (or ‘folk’)
culture and responds to the agency of matter and political landscapes
that shape global flows of faith and local communities. This methodology
recognises that meaning and communication are often non-verbal and
are constituted in the vital present in ways that are shaped by complex
political, social and cultural histories. The methods for collaborative art-
making which Hickey-Moody developed makes space for a de-centring of
colonial histories and for non-verbal affective communication in research
with children. These methods span across a range of media and employ
an array of practices that offer different articulations of Hickey-Moody’s
(2009, 2013, 2017, 2018) theory that attachments and orientations are
often experienced and performed unconsciously.
As well as offering an interpretation of children’s art (Chapter 3:
Seeing), this book interrogates the ‘work’ of creating art, the relational
assemblages between the child, their materials and their environment,
as they construct their art (Chapter 2: Doing). We also examine the
ontological or material power of the processes of art-making in creating
space for children to be validated and to relate to others in creative ways
(Chapter 4: Being). Finally, we look at the impacts and benefits for chil-
dren involved in the research, to understand and better articulate how art
empowers children to communicate in ways they feel most comfortable
(Chapter 5: Believing). We build on a long tradition of approaches to arts
practices, and our analysis delves much further into the processes of chil-
dren’s art-making than visual analysis alone. We examine the evocative and
complex processes through which children’s artworks can become sites of
investigation of everyday concerns, where flying soccer fields and ‘staring
8 A. HICKEY-MOODY ET AL.

at the stars’ become solutions to mental health issues or climate change.

We agree with Boyden and Ennew (1997) who position the child’s inter-
pretation of their art as more important than the data of paintings itself,
signalling the importance of being attuned to children’s cultural ways
of seeing. Rather than providing ‘one truth’, children’s art methodolo-
gies are opportunities for children to formulate and express their own
subjectivities through the process of making and representing their art.
Unsurprisingly, these processes often teach us more about what is going
on in the world than books ever could. What adult could have dreamt
up the idea that the key to happiness was putting an ice cream machine
in every home? Or that flying recycling centres are a possible solution to
climate change?

Chapter Outlines
This book is designed to provide a theoretical, methodological and prac-
tical guide. It is structured in four parts, each part oriented to the ways
of doing, seeing, being and believing in children’s art as a methodology.
Chapter 2, Doing, offers practical suggestions for arts-based
approaches to researching with children. Through example lesson plans
and strategies for engagement, we show how visual, digital and three-
dimensional arts media activate different aspects of children’s imagi-
nations and can enable children to communicate complex experiences
and perspectives. Our arts-based approaches to researching with chil-
dren are outlined here as our research methodology. They illustrate how
vitally important art is in communicating complex information in non-
confronting ways. To demonstrate this point, this chapter draws on data
from the Interfaith Childhoods project to formulate practical guides to
facilitating art-making as a method for data collection.
Chapter 3, Seeing, shows how children offer creative representations of
themselves and their worlds through making art, often expressing opin-
ions that run counter to mainstream and popular views. This chapter
outlines the steps we take to understand how children represent them-
selves through their art, and provides a loose structure with which to
analyse children’s art. We develop a lens of folk media and visual analysis
to investigate how children see themselves in their production of art and
how we come to understand them through this process, and to examine
children’s expressions and experiences of community, faith and belonging.
 1 INTRODUCTION 9

Positioned as folk media, the children’s value images, self-portraits, future

cities and identity images emerge as new ways of seeing the self.
Developmental researchers, psychologists and art therapists have devel-
oped a range of activities and strategies for the interpretation of children’s
drawings and paintings, which we use as starting points for our visual
analysis. Though we are not psychologists and do not use art therapy or
analysis of mental health through arts practice, we do attune ourselves
to children’s expression of themselves through bodily affect and visual
depictions of trauma, displacement and fear, as well as family, love and
friendship. Our aim, however, is to look beyond the artwork itself to
examine the motivations and prompts which encourage children’s artistic
creations and the affects that inform the story behind the piece. This
chapter provides an outline with which to not only understand children’s
art, but to see it in a completely new form, as a folk media narrative which
both has subcultural power and expresses children’s voices.
Chapter 4, Being, engages with the embodied and material aspects of
making art with children. We examine how the children’s art narrates
their being in space, their ways of negotiating space and of relating to
the spaces in which they spend their everyday lives. Artworks such as
value pictures, identity pictures and pictures of sustainable cities reflect
the children’s affective relationships with the spaces they are familiar with,
and the spaces they anticipate, remember, project and imagine. These
include the faraway countries they know from their family histories and
the places and communities that inform their identities, as well as the
fantastic and fanciful places they imagine for themselves. They also include
the urban, dense and busy environments that mark contemporary child-
hoods in much of the world, and the real, lived experience of home,
school, park and playground.
Our conceptual framework is based on new materialist notions of
the entanglement of becoming and being, and on the interrelationship
between the children and the spaces in which they live, play, learn, create
art and interact with their peers. Karen Barad (2007) and those who have
taken up her work in the space of feminist new materialism employ the
concept of entanglement to demonstrate the fact that we, as people, are
not free. We are attached, entangled with other people, with places, with
objects and the more-than-human world. Entanglement helps to show
the relational nature of who we are and draws attention to the responsive
nature of human life. As such, entanglement is considered a ‘posthuman’
and ‘new materialist’ concept. The word posthuman expresses criticism
10 A. HICKEY-MOODY ET AL.

of the age of enlightenment and associated beliefs that predominantly

white European men and knowledges are the centre of our world. If
the white European man can be seen as the model of the human, or
as ‘humanism’, then posthumanism is the story of the other humans:
BIPOC, women, children, the disabled, LGBTQIA+ and our relational
becomings with animals, lands, atmospheres and ideas. Posthumanism is
a philosophy of the people and for the people: it makes space for everyday
ways of knowing, and it believes we are entangled and dependent and
messy. It does not profess to have all the answers. As founding posthuman
scholar Rosi Braidotti describes, ‘the challenge of the posthuman condi-
tion consists in grabbing the opportunities offered by the decline of the
unitary subject position upheld by humanism, which has mutated in a
number of complex directions’ (2013, 50). New materialism is a branch of
thinking that has similar politics and beliefs. The ‘new’ partly signals femi-
nism—‘materialism’ is often used to describe Marxist scholarship and a
very masculine-dominated approach. The ‘new materialists’ do not adopt
a Marxist lens; rather, they investigate the agency of things: of places,
objects, sounds and smells. Our entanglements are responsive and recip-
rocal, and new materialism explores how the more-than-human world
acts on humans. In advancing this perspective, we examine how indoor
and outdoor spaces enable different ways of being and becoming, as the
children express their affective responses and strategies of place-making.
We interrogate notions of ‘nature’ and ‘environment’, and we investigate
how these play out in the children’s imagination. Children populate their
artworks with plants and animals, people and buildings. Using theories
of posthumanist childhoods as a lens, we examine the children’s affec-
tive relationships with animals and plants and features of the environment
such as rocks, water, the sun and the sky, and how they relate to them
through their artwork and performances, in which the children’s ideas
about the interdependence between humans and their environment come
to the fore.
Chapter 5, Believing , presents the project’s pathway to impact, which
we have created through arts-based methods in research with children
of many different faith backgrounds, languages, cultural differences, class
dynamics and a varying level of support at home. We have found arts-
based methods to be one of the most unobtrusive ways of gaining
access into childworlds, as themes of faith, love and community, or about
war, displacement and fear emerge through the act of making. In the
context of the educational curriculum, however, this gives rise to what
 1 INTRODUCTION 11

Willis (1978) calls ‘the immediate and tortuous problems of Monday

morning’ (190)—how can, and why should, arts-based methods be actu-
ally implemented, come Monday morning, in the already under-funded
and over-worked institutions such as schools, community centres, child-
care centres and art galleries? This final chapter explores some of the
concrete impacts of such methods on the communities imbricated within
these contexts and offers arts-based practices as ways of expanding the
creative and civic capabilities not only of children but of entire publics.
We look at impact case studies and interviews with teachers and parents
that highlight how the methods work to improve children’s mental health
(Coholic et al. 2020), their sense of self, overall confidence (Fox and
Diffily 2001) and their connection to or understanding of their heritage
or culture. Findings from impact case studies of our methods and focus
group discussions show that not only the children, but also the parents
and carers, really valued the art-making as a route to talking about their
family heritage. Through making art about their home, identity, faith and
communities, we find that children grow and change and become across
the three years of research. This chapter tracks the progression of this
research over some formative developmental years and investigates how
arts-based projects might have long-lasting impacts on children’s lives.
We argue that non-verbal communication by way of material expression
is one of the best ways to include young voices in places they are often
left out.

Conclusion
Children are valuable members of society, and they have agency, voice
and power. We consider them artists in their own right and encourage
the children in our research to create art without the expectation of being
graded or compared to others. With the freedom to express the things
that often go unsaid, colourful portraits of faith, community, identity
and belonging emerge through the act of making. Making collaboratively
across the UK and Australia, this book outlines the methods in the
Interfaith Childhoods project which provide a resource for commu-
nicating with and understanding children. Through folk media, new
materialism, posthuman approaches to childhood and arts-based ethnog-
raphy, we build an argument with which to construct future narratives in
community-based arts research that account for children’s voices through
non-verbal formats. Acknowledging the significance of children’s art
12 A. HICKEY-MOODY ET AL.

worlds through movements like art brut and outsider art, we write about
our methods of doing, seeing, being and believing to explain the ways we
can be a part of children’s worlds. To us, art is more than expression. It is
a mode of communication that includes those often left out of mainstream
narratives, like children or those who do not speak mainstream languages.
We hope this book serves as a guide to working with communities of
children in ways that are impactful and enjoyable for all involved.

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 CHAPTER 2

Doing: Arts Workshops as Research

with Children

Abstract This chapter presents both the rationale of and a practical

guide to using arts-based methods in research with children. We outline
a number of adaptable lesson plans, including guides for activities,
strategies for engagement and required materials. We discuss examples
from the fieldwork of the Interfaith Childhoods project to demon-
strate how applied visual and digital arts practices can activate different
aspects of children’s imaginaries and enable children to communicate
complex experiences, emotions and perspectives in accessible, engaging
and non-confrontational ways. Drawing from new materialist theories of
entanglement, we offer arts workshops as sites in which children engage
in complex processes of being and becoming, and arts-based methods as
a way of probing the complex interactions of children with their world.

Keywords Arts-based methods · Childhood · Lesson plans · New

materialism · Arts workshops

The original version of this chapter was revised: Revised Figure 2.4 has been
updated. The correction to this chapter is available at
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-68060-2_7

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 17

Switzerland AG 2021, corrected publication 2021
A. Hickey-Moody et al., Arts-Based Methods for Research
with Children, Studies in Childhood and Youth,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-68060-2_2
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