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Sarah

Research undertaken by Sarah Ferner

I am interested in how young British Muslims and young British Jews think and speak about Israel, Palestine and the Holocaust.

My research will immerse young British Jewish and Muslim co-producers/enquirers in different kinds of thinking (creative, collaborative, critical and caring) to investigate Israel, Palestine and the Holocaust as entities, distant geographically and in time, but inextricably intertwined with their everyday lives and formative experiences.  This research views listening to children’s ideas and opinions on matters that affect them as central to ideas of participation, social justice, democratic practice and agency.  My research centralises children’s meaning-making and validates children’s voice and agency.

The design of my research is focused on the creation and curation of a cache of objects, stories and artefacts by British Jewish and Muslim co-producers/researchers/experts, including myself, with some of these arising specifically from my own (auto-ethnographic) back story. This research acknowledges objects, stories and artefacts as carriers of complex visual, material, cultural and social meanings generating multiple narratives and interpretations.

As a working teacher with twenty years experience in the classroom, the opportunity arises for me in addition, to combine a range of research methods with my pedagogic expertise in facilitating Socratic conversations using the pedagogy known as Philosophy for Children (P4C).  The use of P4C as an experimental research method requires me to engage with the paradox of being at the self-same time an authority figure (a teacher) and facilitator, embracing both interdisciplinary, inclusive, participatory research methods and P4C which mirrors them; in being an inclusive and democratic pedagogy; bucking those trends in mainstream education which tend to position children as passive acquirers of knowledge, imparted mainly through direct instruction.