Scrutinizing ‘A nice Spot’: an art-based method for doing multicultural educational research with children and youth

In research, which adopts a children-centered approach, it has become commonplace to include (elements of) art-based methodologies in the project design (see e.g. Barker & Weller, 2003; Cappello, 2005; Quiroz, Milam-Brooks, & Adams-Romena, 2013; White, 2012). However, as it is plausible that particular art-based methods do not cater to the preferences of all children (White & Bushin, 2011), there is a need for developing multi-modal art-based methodologies. Furthermore, in educational research on migration together with children, who grow up in transnational social fields (Levitt and Schiller 2004), there is a need for developing methodologies that facilitate rich understandings of children’s multi-levelled sense of belonging (Yuval-Davis 2006).

In the paper, I present and discuss the merits and shortcomings of ‘A nice spot’, a multi modal art-based method, which has been developed and used as part of the EU Horizon 2020 MiCREATE-project (Jensen 2022), and in a pilot project on the reception of Ukrainian children in Danish schools in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
‘A nice spot’ was intended to be a site for researcher-participant familiarization and to form the basis for conducting narrative interviews with the children. The discussion is based on a critical and comparative analysis of empirical material from the two projects, including field notes, interview data, and participants’ art pieces, generated during fieldwork with children in Danish primary and lower-secondary schools.