Project summary

ALPHABETICA aims to provide effective solutions that allow children and young people at risk of poverty or social exclusion to access arts and arts-based education through co-creative participatory research actions.

ALPHABETICA will carry out 12 pilot actions across 8 European countries aimed at enhancing the transformative effect of active participation in community-driven artistic co-creation activities. Collectively, the research pilot actions cover a range of school settings and out-of-school community settings with children from 3 to 18, as well as young people and adults of various ages.

The project is informed by a synthesis of theories of youth participatory action research, Theory of Change, pedagogies of care, love and enchantment, pedagogies of past, present and the imagined future, and the more-than-human approach. This conceptual framework invites a reflexive and in-depth exploration of children and young people’s complex everyday realities, while offering opportunities for creative self-expression and meaning-making, participation, skills-development, and relationship-building.

ALPHABETICA will take a transformative approach by:

• Providing qualitative and quantitative data on attitudes towards and perceptions of arts by children, families, educators and policymakers
• Using participatory and caring approaches and pedagogies to provide an evidence-based assessment of the instrumental outcomes of arts-based education, their transformative impact, and their transferability to children and young people’s other life domains
• Taking and teaching a caring approach that through arts-based education will sustain a commitment to lifelong learning
• Providing evidence-based recommendations for policy action