Research Group: Children and childhood
Providing real-world benefits through research for young children, their families and early years' practitioners.
Children and childhood
About Our research
We place the wellbeing and lives of children, families and parents at the heart of our work.
Many projects engage with some of the youngest children, their families, and a range of early years-focused practitioners in nurseries, schools, museums, galleries and other arts organisations.
Our research programme provides a strongly-theorised holistic perspective that resists narrowing early years provision and practice, paying attention to issues of social justice. We avoid ‘deficit’ models of parenting and child development.
We are developing models for working/researching in collaboration with partners, bringing different combinations of researchers, practitioners, organisations, parents and doctoral students together in teams including:
- researcher-in-residence
- arts-informed co-production
- working with doctoral students, researchers and cross-sector practitioners in co-produced research projects
Our group collaborates with the Arts and Humanities and Health, Psychology and Social Care faculties to:
- build interdisciplinary research teams to address particular, complex and contemporary research issues
- create doctoral supervision teams across faculties to meet the needs of increasingly diverse scholarship research topics and innovative methodologies
Research activities
We promote research-focused activities across the Faculty of Education and beyond through a range of events and ongoing processes that include:
- conferences, methodology training and seminar series
- mentoring and reviewing work, supporting publishing, engaging with co-authoring, co-writing and reviewing grant bid writing
- training doctoral students and engaging them in research projects
- teaching on and working with teams developing new undergraduate courses and postgraduate programmes
2020 - 2021 seminar series recordings
Watch the videos of our latest seminar series:
Our expertise
Wherever possible, we develop our projects with practitioners and parents to ensure sensitivity to family and community values and experiences.
Our research expertise includes:
- the life-worlds of 2-year-olds in the classroom
- museum and gallery education
- early childhood literacy and communicative practices
- collaborative and co-produced research with parents/carers
- behaviour and reputation
- feeling different and mental health
- children’s learning with objects
- ethics, power and childhood
- artists in nurseries and schools
Our key areas of active research are:
- Birth to Three Matters and two-year-olds in education settings
- Gallery and museum work with under fives
- Early childhood literacy and communicative practices
- Mental health, being/feeling ‘different’ at school, behaviour and reputation
Birth to three matters and beyond
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About this area
Building on the pioneering work of Professor Lesley Abbott OBE with the Birth to Three Matters agenda (DfE, 2001-3), we continue to push forward with the sustained programme of research that we have undertaken over the past 20 years.
This research has shifted perceptions of the ways in which babies, through the youngest school-starters (two-year-olds) to older children, experience their worlds in both formal and informal education settings.
Over that time, our research has influenced:
- policy
- secondary legislation
- workforce development
- practices in schools, museums and galleries across England
It has also produced innovative resources to enhance practices across education, health and the cultural sector.
Young children in gallery, museum, arts and cultural spaces
Feeling different at school, behaviour and reputation
Other projects
Children and childhood
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Key publications
Ainsworth, S.L., Welbourne, S.R. & Hesketh, A. (2016) Lexical restructuring in preliterate children: Evidence from novel measures of phonological representation Applied Psycholinguistics, 37(4) pp 997-1023
Barron, I. & Taylor, L. (2017) Eating and scraping away at practice with two year olds Pedagogy, Culture and Society. 25(4):567-581 DOI: 10.1080/14681366.2017.1305437
Gallagher, M., Prior, J., Needham, M. & Holmes, R. (2017) Listening differently: A pedagogy for expanded listening British Educational Research Journal 43(6):1246-1265
Hackett, A., Procter, L. & Kummerfeld, R. (2018) Exploring Abstract, Physical, Social and Embodied Space: developing an approach for analysing museum spaces for young children. Children’s Geographies 16(5) pp 489-502
Hackett, A., Holmes, R., Macrae, C., & Procter, L. (2018) Young children’s museum geographies; spatial, material and bodily ways of knowing Guest Editors Introduction. Children’s Geographies 16(5) pp 481-488
Holmes, R. (2016) My tongue on your theory: the bittersweet reminder of every-thing unnameable Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 37(5) pp 662-679 [Special issue: Fabulous monsters: alternative discourses of childhood in education. guest editors: R. Holmes, L. Jones & M. MacLure]
Frigerio, A., Benozzo, A., Holmes, R. & Runswick-Cole, K. (2018) The Doing and Undoing of the “Autistic Child”: Cutting Together and Apart Interview-Based Empirical Materials Qualitative Inquiry 1-12 DOI: 10.1177/1077800417735132
MacLure, M. (2016) The refrain of the a-grammatical child: finding another language in/for qualitative researchCultural Studies <-> Critical Methodologies 16(3) pp 173-182
MacRae, C. (2019) The Red Blanket: A dance of animacy Global Studies of Childhood Online First
MacRae, C., Hackett, A., Holmes, R. & Jones, L. (2018) Vibrancy, repetition and movement: posthuman theories for reconceptualising young children in museums Children’s Geographies. 16(5) pp 503-515
Procter, L. & Hackett, A. (2017) Playing with Place in Early Childhood: An analysis of emotion, agency and materiality in children’s dark play Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood 18(2) pp 213–226
Trafi-Prats, L. (2017) Girls’ aesthetics of existence in/with Hayao Miyazaki’s Films. Cultural Studies <-> Critical Methodologies 17(5) pp 376-383 [Special issue on Girl Subjectivity edited by Michelle Bae Dimitriadis, University of New York-Buffalo]
Contact
Contact us
You can contact individual members of the team through their staff profiles.
For general enquiries, please contact research group lead Prof Rachel Holmes