Childhood research
Childhood research ( English Children and Childhood Studies CCS; Swedish Barnforskning ) is an interdisciplinary research area, the task of which is to understand structural problems that affect the quality of childhood in different cultures and to find approaches to solving them. Childhood research draws on the various disciplines of social science (including anthropology , economics , history , sociology ), the humanities ( literary studies , religious studies , art history ) and behavioral science, especially psychology .
history
Childhood research is a very young research discipline. Considerations for the development of this research area can be found among others. a. in Jean and Richard W. Mills ' Childhood Studies: A Reader in Perspectives of Childhood (2000) and in Mary Jane Kehilys An Introduction to Childhood Studies (2004). The first childhood research projects emerged in the UK in the mid-1980s . These projects emerged as research “modules” within established research areas such as B. educational science .
The emergence of childhood research as an academic discipline must take place in the context of the emergence of other interdisciplinary research areas such as B. African American studies and women's studies can be described. All of these disciplines arose out of the endeavor to make the situation of those social groups accessible to research which until then had received little attention or even remained ousted from science.
Critics of the western dominated knowledge production about childhood z. B. in India claim that precisely this one-sidedly intervention-oriented research approach perpetuates a distorted view that is in the tradition of colonialism. The research agenda is set by the donors.
Childhood research in different countries
Great Britain
As Kehili reports, the subject “Childhood Research ” has only recently existed. In Great Britain, the Open University offered such a course for the first time (2003). Since 2004 Swansea University in Wales also has a Department of Childhood Studies . Others exist at Canterbury Christ Church University ( Canterbury ), Anglia Ruskin University , University of Birmingham , Liverpool John Moores University , Middlesex University (near London ) and Northumbria University ( Newcastle ). London is also home to one of the most important research libraries on the subject: the Froebel Archive for Childhood Studies at Roehampton University, which opened in 1977 .
United States
At US universities, there are already dozens of childhood "modules", and -Nebenfachstudiengängen -Studienschwerpunkten such. B. at Brooklyn College , at Case Western Reserve University ( Cleveland ), at Christopher Newport University ( Newport News ), at the University of Florida ( Gainesville ) and at Plymouth State University ( Plymouth (New Hampshire) ). At Rutgers University in Camden , New Jersey currently the first study program in the country, can also be studied as a major subject in the childhood research (with all created academic levels from Bachelor to the Ph. D. ).
Sweden
In Sweden there are Childhood Research Departments at the Faculty of Education at Gothenburg University and Linköping University .
Germany
In Germany, the Faculty of Education at the University of Erfurt has a department for elementary school education and childhood research. At the Institute for Pedagogy at Elementary and Primary Level at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt, there is a teaching and research focus on childhood research. The Magdeburg-Stendal University of Applied Sciences offers the interdisciplinary course "Applied Childhood Sciences". The “European Master in Childhood Studies and Children's Rights” is offered as a postgraduate master’s degree in English at the Free University of Berlin . The Koblenz University of Applied Sciences offers the part-time distance learning course "Childhood and Social Sciences" with four different focuses.
Other countries
Departments with a research focus on "Childhood Research" also exist at the following universities:
- Monash University , Australia
- Doshisha Women's College , Kyoto , Japan
- Queen Arwa University , Sana'a , Yemen
- York University , Toronto , Canada
- Vilnius Pedagogical University , Vilnius , Lithuania
See also
literature
English speaking:
- The Palgrave handbook of childhood studies , ed. by Jens Qvortrup, William A. Corsaro and Michael-Sebastian Honig, Basingstoke, Hampshire [u. a.]: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009
- Vibiana Bowman (ed.): Scholarly Resources for Children and Childhood Studies: A Research Guide and Annotated Bibliography . Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2007. ISBN 0810858746
- Mary Jane Kehily: An Introduction to Childhood Studies . Oxford, UK: Open University Press, 2004. ISBN 0631233970
- Julie Thompson Klein: Interdisciplinarity: History, Theory, and Practice. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1990. ISBN 0814320880
- Jean Mills, Richard W. Mills: Childhood Studies: A Reader in Perspectives of Childhood . London: Routledge, 2000. ISBN 0415214157
German speaking:
- Georg Breidenstein, Annedore Prengel : School research and childhood research - a contrast? , Vs-Verlag, 2005. ISBN 3810041076
- Ingeborg Hedderich , Jeanne Reppin, Corinne Butschi: Perspectives on Diversity in Early Childhood. Exploring diversity with children . Julius Klinkhardt Verlag, 2019, ISBN 978-3-7815-2328-9
- Friederike Heinzel : Methods of Childhood Research , Juventa, 2000. ISBN 3779902087
- Michael-Sebastian Honig (Ed.): Orders of Childhood: Problems and Perspectives in Childhood Research , Juventa, 2009, ISBN 3779915472
- Klaus Hurrelmann, Heidrun Bründel: Introduction to Childhood Research , Beltz, 2003. ISBN 340725282X
- Manfred Markefka, Bernhard Nauck: Handbook of Childhood Research , Luchterhand, 2001. ISBN 3472009616
- Wiesbauer, Elisabeth: The child as an object of science. Medical and psychological research in children at the University of Vienna 1800-1914 . With a foreword by Igor A. Caruso, Vienna: Löcker, 1981, ISBN 3854090315
Magazines
- Childhood. A journal of global child research
- Children and Sociology
- Discourse. Studies on childhood, youth, family and society
- Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth
- Sociological Studies of Childhood
Web links
- Klaus Hurrelmann, Heidrun Bründel: Introduction to Childhood Research Book Review
- The Center for Children and Childhood Studies , Rutgers University (Engl.)
- The Open University (Engl.)
- Childhood Research at Johann Wolfgang Goethe University
Individual evidence
- ^ "The oil crisis in the 1970s and the ensuing debt crisis in the 1980s frustrated the steps undertaken by the newly independent government of India to develop a debate on childhood and child welfare. Though studies tended to adopt the rather strict disciplinary boundaries we know in the West, there had also been debates questioning the adoption of western ideas of childhood. With the crisis, international organizations such as UNICEF, the ILO and the World Bank, and to an increasing degree government and non-government western donors, started funding research on children, but under the strict conditions that researchers conform closely to their set priorities - often laid down in great detail. The role of the Indian researcher was to be, and still is, to fill in the gaps in quantitative knowledge, not to question underlying assumptions about the problematic aspects of childhood in India. ”Olga Nieuwenhuys: Editorial: Is there an Indian childhood? In: Childhood 2009, 16, 147-152, quotation p. 148
- ↑ www.hs-magdeburg.de: Applied Childhood Studies course , online here ; last viewed on June 11, 2009
- ↑ www.fu-berlin.de: European Master in Childhood Studies and Children's Rights , here online ; last accessed on April 9, 2012
- ↑ Home MAKS . In: Koblenz University of Applied Sciences . ( hs-koblenz.de [accessed September 24, 2017]).