LiveBlog: Engaging young people as researchers

I was at the Research Methods Festival in Oxford this afternoon in a session on 'Engaging young people as researchers'. To capture some of the learning I used CoverItLive to live-blog key messages. If you are viewing this post on the RightSpace website you should be able to replace the live blog below and browse some of the key issues that came up in the presentations and discussions.

Engaging Young People are Researchers (Research Methods Festival)</a>

Whilst most of the workshop participants came from University settings, the presenters were not within Academic institutions - raising some interesting questions for me about how to fit youth-led research into PhD study rather than, for example, a contracted evaluation project.

Giving young people a role in knowledge production: stability and credibility

One workshop participant emphasised the importance of giving young people a role in knowledge production, which also got me thinking about where young people's research is published. If it only ends up on websites, which constantly change their structure or end up removing lots of key content when they relaunch, or worse still, never being publicly shared at all, it is very difficult for young people's agendas and voices to become part of the wider tapestry of research on an ongoing basis. It's also hard for young people to read and access the work of those young researchers who've gone before them, and to progressively develop ideas rather than starting afresh every time.

Much of academic thought runs on references. If an idea can be referenced, it can be used. If it's not accessible in a peer-reviewed journal or a recognised formal report - the writer wishing to quote it needs to put extra effort into justifying it's inclusion as a source. 

A tweet asking about the presence of any journals of youth-led research yielded this helpful response from Tom Burke pointing to an upcoming book focussed on young people's research, and to the Youth Voice journal of IARS. The Youth Voice journal is well worth a look, although sadly it seems to not be fully open access, limiting the possible contribution it can make.

So - is it time for more action on an open access journal for youth-led research? Or perhaps just a repository of research making it easy to track and reference the issues that matter to young people? Or is it already out there.

Comments as always very much welcome...