Find out about the latest series of online research seminars from University of Glasgow’s Dumfries Campus’ Education, Language, Policy and Sustainability Research Group focusing on challenges of climate, migration, and care-experience.
This semester sees a series focused on Resilience in Crisis, focusing on challenges of climate, migration, and care-experience. All events will be held on Zoom, at 3pm on Mondays, and are open to students, teachers, academic colleagues, and external guests, so please feel free to advertise these to your professional networks.
Monday 13th October at 3pm sees Freya Skinner from the National Centre for Resilience present on: Creativity and collaboration for resilience: Gamifying learning for climate resilience
Schools are increasingly recognised as vital spaces for helping children understand and prepare for risks associated with natural hazards and our changing climate. Yet traditional approaches to resilience education are often top-down and instructional rather than participatory and engaging. In this talk I will explore the role of creativity in resilience education, through the ‘Are you prepared?’ card game project from the National Centre for Resilience. Reflecting on the value of creativity in supporting engaging and inclusive learning opportunities, I will look at how our project developed through co-design with end users and collaboration across education, design, policy and resilience practice. I will share my learnings from the project and discuss the broader impact this has had on the NCR’s ongoing work.
https://uofglasgow.zoom.us/j/82084682085
Monday 17th November at 3pm sees Diana Camps, Lecturer in the School of Social & Environmental Sustainability, present on Competing conceptions of childhood in UK policy: Implications for social sustainability and education.
Despite having rights to special protection due to vulnerabilities of age, trauma and unaccompanied status, unaccompanied asylum-seeking children are still subject to the UK’s punitive immigration system. This talk draws on a critical review (Blomaert 2005) of age assessment guidance to show how children/ young people are discussed in relation to age dispute processes, and the impact this has on their trauma and resettlement trajectories. I argue that the characteristic of age is instrumentalised to subvert the UK’s commitment to the protection of children by transforming them into non-children through the designation of ‘age-disputed person’(McLaughlin 2018). I discuss the importance of socially sustainable approaches to the treatment of unaccompanied migrant children and the implications for education.
https://uofglasgow.zoom.us/j/82459433304
Finally, Monday 8th December at 3pm sees Elle Scott, a SGSSS/SDS scholarship holder working in partnership with Dumfries & Galloway Council, present on: Fostering hopeful narratives for the futures of care experienced youth: an exploration of successful adulthood from their own perspectives
The dominant, global narrative surrounding the futures of children and young people who have experienced care is often infused with fatalism and bounded by the prevailing effort to improve outcomes and continuous endeavour for a more equal society. This paper will share and discuss the methods and preliminary findings from a participatory action research project which aimed to explore and problematise the poor outcomes narrative by understanding ways in which this framing impacts and shapes care experienced young people’s sense of hope for their futures as well as their aspirations and sense of self; traditional, adult-framed conceptualisations of success can have long-lasting consequences and so have been interrogated and evaluated in line with their own lived experiences. By understanding how complex multi-agency systems frame and measure success, there appears a need for a move beyond individualist considerations of young people’s resilience and a shift towards the development of strategies for countering the dominant story.