Zine but not Heard

Creating visual conversations between marginalised groups and museum educators.

This collaborative project used multimedia zine-making to facilitate conversations between informal science educators and care experienced young people and their foster carers. 

A group of nine foster carers and eight care-experienced young people took part in the research project on understanding experiences of fostering relationships. PhD student Eva Sprecher worked with peer researchers Debbie Hill and Ikesha Tuitt, as well as supervisors Professor Nick Midgley and Dr Michelle Sleed, to understand themes in these experiences of fostering relationships. The findings of this research project were written up into an academic paper published in Adoption & Fostering. 

At the same time as examining the data using a research lens, the project employed a care-experienced artist collaborator, David Grimm, to illustrate the data. David was given anonymised extracts of data to create a series of illustrations. The findings of this research project and David's illustrations are brought together in the Zine 'No Typical Care Story'. This zine is a useful resource for advocates, foster carers, social workers or social work students, researchers or any professionals working with care-experienced people.  

In addition, the project team co-hosted a workshop for informal science educators, to build confidence, skill sets and knowledge about the experience of care experienced young people and their foster carers. This workshop was co-designed with Dr Delyth Edwards and Rosie Canning who brought perspectives from their own research on the intersection between museum and informal education spaces and care-experience. 

The workshop aimed to share and co-construct ideas and reflections for educators to use to build confidence, representation and participation of care experienced young people and their carers in informal science education. The workshop lead to an Activity Zine being created as an output.

Image credit: David Grimm.