CUNY Academic Commons

Research with Children and Youth Seminar Fall, 2019

Roger Hart
Fall, 2019
3 credits
This seminar is designed as a working group for students who wish to design research involving children, childhood or youth or are already in the process of doing so. It aligns with the growing interdisciplinary field of childhood and youth studies. Students from psychology, the social sciences, education and the humanities are invited to participate. We will work collectively by rotating discussion around each participant’s research. Seminar participants may be at the very earliest stage of conceptualising their work, still defining their question, already in the process of designing methods or even beginning to interpret their findings. Your project may range from an in-depth literature review, through archival research to empirical research, or any combination of these. At all stages, there is value in gaining a perspective from across disciplines. It commonly results in enriching the research by combining different disciplinary perspectives within a single study or transcending disciplinary knowledge through a new integration of theory and method. Either way, it deepens one’s research endeavour. An additional component of the seminar will be to ask how we might differently conceptualize our research given different possible audiences and end goals. The study may be primarily focused on theory-building, on influencing policy or on action for more immediate change. Again, this need not be limited to only one of these orientations.