Odd: feeling different in the world of education

这个为期3年的跨学科项目将调查的经验，和反响，谁不觉得很容易“适应”在学校的孩子。虽然这种感觉并不总是创伤性的，但Young Minds（2016）的统计数据显示，每个教室都有三个孩子被诊断出心理健康问题。这项建议是与研究所在的学校合作制定的，该学校是曼彻斯特Levenshulme的阿尔马公园小学，因其多样化的学校和当地社区而被选中。这项研究是及时的，首先，在其创新的方法，重新思考'差异'，以贡献新的知识，反欺凌和包容议程在学校，其次，在其方法，建立在发展领域的社区共同产生的知识（Facer和Enright，2016），并将艺术和人类学的镜头聚焦在对奇怪的实质性研究上，在过去的5年里，英国政府在多样性、心理健康和福祉方面投入了大量资金，特别关注幼儿的韧性（DfE，2016; DoH，2014）。我们的合作学校的日常工作反映了许多学校的精神;通过这些举措，他们对“庆祝差异”的承诺是显而易见的，但他们对从教育政策中过滤下来的个性化话语表示关注，集体定义谁在教育和社会规范之外福尔斯。拟议的项目认识到，需要一种跨学科的方法来打破传统的教育思想的差异和一致性。我们将汇集来自艺术，人类学和教育的观点，以研究如何感觉“不适应”，“孤独者”或“古怪的人”可以对一些孩子产生不利影响，同时认识到其他人可能会更自信地占据这个空间。儿童被认为是世界上有能力、有技能的社会行为者，他们对这一主题有着迷人的观点。与整个小学社区合作制作，涉及所有年龄组的儿童（4-11岁），家长，教师和非教学人员，研究将产生不同类型的实践为基础的合作，通过对奇的生成观念的质疑，提出学校政策修辞和实践的紧迫和困难的问题;奇的意思是什么;它的价值是什么，为什么这很重要，它告诉我们关于普通的，每天遇到的另一个人，地方和事物。该研究小组将开发以艺术为主导的战略和其他资源，以最大限度地减少感觉“奇怪”或“不同”的破坏性影响，但也将试图利用差异的潜力作为创造力，赋权和政策批评的力量。为了我们的目的，“奇”这个词为学校背景下的其他思考开辟了一个空间，在学校背景下，差异，多样性和包容性的强大话语（诺里奇，2014）与正常化和一致性的物质过程发生摩擦（Escherard，Menter & Smith，2010）。该项目将产生新的跨学科知识，提高理解和发展创造性的见解如何艺术理论和实践，以及社会科学方法论经验有助于一个新兴的工作领域，以不同的方式对待差异（巴拉德，2014）。项目团队拥有这项跨学科研究所需的专业知识：视觉人类学家，具有人类学和艺术/设计之间跨学科联系的专业知识（Ravetz）;在人，物体和地方相互作用的大型社会环境中工作的社会参与艺术家（Shaw）;共同制作顾问（Pool）和教育家（Pahl），具有广泛的共同制作和学校经验工作的知识;一位在儿童和童年外部资助研究以及跨学科、艺术知情方法方面拥有丰富经验的PI（Holmes）。

This 3-year interdisciplinary project will investigate the experiences of, and repercussions for, children who do not find it easy to 'fit in' at school. While such feelings are not always traumatic, statistics produced by Young Minds (2016) suggest three children in every classroom have diagnosed mental health issues. This proposal has been developed in partnership with the school where the research will be located, Alma Park Primary School in Levenshulme, Manchester, selected for its diverse school and local communities. This research is timely, firstly, in its innovative approach to rethinking 'difference' to contribute new knowledge to the anti-bullying and inclusion agendas in school and secondly, in its methodology, building on the developing field of community co-produced knowledge (Facer and Enright, 2016), and focusing the lenses of art and anthropology on both the substantive inquiry into oddness, and the theoretical work of developing interdisciplinary methodology and protocols.Over the last 5 years the UK government has invested heavily in diversity, mental health and wellbeing, with a particular focus on young children's resilience (DfE, 2016; DoH, 2014). The day-to-day work of our partner school reflects the ethos of many schools; informed by such initiatives, their commitment to 'celebrating difference' palpable, yet they express concern for individualising discourses that filter down from educational policy, collectively defining who falls outside of educational and social norms. The proposed project recognises that an interdisciplinary approach is needed to break out of conventional educational thinking about difference and conformity. We will bring together perspectives from art, anthropology and education to examine how feeling a 'misfit', 'loner' or the 'odd one out' can have a detrimental impact on some children, whilst recognising others may occupy this space more confidently. Children are perceived as capable, skilled social actors in the world, who have fascinating perspectives on this topic. Working in co-production with a whole primary school community, involving children from all year groups (aged 4-11), parents, teachers and non-teaching staff, the research will produce different kinds of practice-based collaborations to ask pressing and difficult questions of policy rhetoric and practices in school via interrogations of the generative idea of odd; what odd means; what its value is and why this matters, what it tells us about ordinary, everyday encounters with one another, places and things. The research collective will develop arts-led strategies and other resources for minimizing the destructive effects of feeling 'odd' or 'different', but will also attempt to harness the potency of difference as a force for creativity, empowerment and policy critique. For our purposes, the term odd opens a space for thinking otherwise in a school context where powerful discourses of difference, diversity and inclusion (Norwich, 2014) rub up against material processes of normalisation and conformity (Brisard, Menter & Smith, 2010). This project will generate new interdisciplinary knowledge, enhance understandings and develop creative insights into how art theory and practice, together with social science methodologies contribute empirically to an emerging field of work that attends to difference differently (Barad, 2014). The project team have the expertise required for this interdisciplinary study: a visual anthropologist with expertise in interdisciplinary connections between anthropology and art/design (Ravetz); a socially engaged artist working in large social environments where people, object and places interact (Shaw); a co-production consultant (Pool) and educationalist (Pahl) with extensive knowledge of co-production and empirical work in schools; a PI with extensive experience of externally-funded research on children and childhood and interdisciplinary, arts-informed methodologies (Holmes).