Research: Belonging and learning

Research summary

• January to December 2019

This networking project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) through the Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF), aimed to explore the role of arts-based methods in promoting dialogue between displaced populations of young people and policy makers concerned with education provision. 

Using three arts-based workshops in Kenya, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), we wanted to explore young refugees’ and street-connected young people’s opinions and experiences of education.

We ran three workshops:

Some of the art forms explored in the workshops provided more of a vehicle for the young people to express their ideas than others, but all of them enabled a more horizontal space for dialogue.

Future projects should involve working with the young people to support their decision making around the art forms chosen, in order to hear their voices more effectively when in dialogue with policy makers.

In addition, this project provided a great deal of learning about how projects involving vulnerable young people should be conducted – particularly when the projects involve amplifying young people’s voices for advocacy reasons and there are cultural barriers that need to be addressed when trying to make young people’ voices heard.   

The project report and the project evaluation report both outline key findings from the project and recommendations for future work.