Joel Friis
- Email: pr16jif@leeds.ac.uk
- Thesis title: Children's Rights in the Classroom Assemblage: A new materialist approach to understanding the enactment of children's participation rights.
- Supervisors: Dr Peter Hart, Dr Anne Luke
Profile
During my previous employment in pre-school nurseries I became interested in children’s social worlds and decided to study Childhood Studies at the University of Leeds, where my interest in children’s citizenship, rights and autonomy grew. I wished to conduct my own research on children’s rights and how they are afforded or limited in children’s most direct interaction with the state, their education.
After the completion of my BA Childhood Studies degree at the University of Leeds I was awarded an ESRC funded 1+3 Studentship through the White Rose Doctoral Training Partnership. As part of this studentship I completed an MA in Social Research in the School of Sociology and Social Policy before returning to the School of Education for my PhD research.
Research interests
My research is focused on children’s participation rights in UK education settings. My Master’s research sought to establish teachers’ knowledge of and practice concerning these rights, utilising a mixed methods survey to establish the role the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, particularly Articles 12 and 13 therein, plays in the promotion of children’s right to meaningful involvement in the making of decisions that affect them.
My PhD research also focuses on children’s participation rights in UK schools, with a greater focus on the exploration of children’s ‘voices’ in education settings. Taking a post-humanist approach to participatory social research, this study seeks to acknowledge the complexity of the classroom and the various influences on the ‘voice’ that is produced in learning and research interactions, while encouraging children and young people to play an active and leading role in the production of data. By combining art-based methods and periods of observation, avoiding sole reliance on the elicitation of verbal or written contributions, this study attends to the complex material interactions housed within the UK primary school clasrooms which produce conditions that facilitate or inhibit agentic decision making on the part of the child.
Qualifications
- BA Childhood Studies
- MA Social Research