Beyond the Disneyesque: children’s participation, spatiality and adult-child relations

Abstract

The article describes a case study of children and young people's participation and the attendant effects on professional practice and child-adult relations. We consider the findings under four headings: professional learning, child-adult relations, childhood memories and the spatial dimensions of change. Evidence indicates that adults and children were finding new ways of working and relating and that these processes were inherent in efforts to reconfigure space. The analysis shows how adult and child identification, relations and associated constructions of childhood and adulthood were connected. We argue that changes occurred in and through the shaping of real and imagined places.