‘Remembering the Feeling’: Exploring Educational Futures with Children and Young People Through Memory Work

Abstract

Educational futures, here defined as the “form of scenarios, projections and visions of the future of education” (Facer, 2021), are a ground of contestation in several aspects of the public sphere, from activists to the media, policy makers and the economy. Taking as a starting point the premise that future possibilities are political, this thesis explores children and young people’s visions of educational otherwises, a topic that to date remains underesearched. I address this topic by asking two main questions: I) How can we use ‘memory as a method’ to explore education futures with children and young people, and II) What futures of education can be/are imagined through school memory work and how? Following the outbreak of COVID-19 and its impact on my research interlocutors’ lives and my research design, these questions have been approached through mixed qualitative methodologies, combining a range of multimodal ethnographic methods, including participant observation, semi-structured interviews, focus groups, and creative workshops. My research was mainly framed through encounters with 12 education activists and students aged 15-19 years old coming primarily through the Ashoka UK Changemaker Schools network. Through this thesis, I emphasise the importance of paying closer attention to the memories of childhood, echoing a call that is being increasingly highlighted in recent literature at the intersection of childhood and memory studies. Through the prism of exploring children/young people’s memories of schooling, I argue for the value of adopting a multimodal approach in the study of memory in childhood and subsequently conducting memory work with children and young people as a means to foreground the educational affects that are important to them in the process of imagining education futures. The futures of education must remain open and contested sites of radical possibility. The contribution of this research is thus in its call to move away from dominant neoliberal orientations to educational futures, arguing fundamentally for the need to include children and young people’s affective educational experiences in our conversations, aspirations and movements towards desired change, and just educational futures made otherwise.