Our latest working paper shares insights from DigiGen’s innovative video workshop methodology which explores how children across five European countries perceive the effects of digitalisation on their current education and future lives.
The video workshops include children and young people and the next generation of teachers as collaborators, co-designers, and co-researchers across the process. The participants crafted the interview questions with DigiGen researchers in a workshop setting, led the interviews between them, and then reflected on the process to allow us to improve how we conduct participatory research approaches going forward. For example, a workshop group of older children (after secondary school transition) would use their own questions they had come up with to conduct an interview with young children (before transition).
This methodology is one of several participatory approaches to conducting our research on the Digital Generation. We hope that our experience of conducting these approaches can support others in taking this path in future research. Developing participatory approaches is key to the realising the updated EU Better Internet for Kids Strategy (BIK+) which holds ‘active participation’ as one of its three core pillars.[1] The European Commission is clear that children should have a say in the digital environment, with research being one vehicle to ensure this.
Read the full working paper here.
[1] European Commission, ‘Better Internet for Kids (BIK+) Strategy’ (2022)