Critical Psychology and Education Cluster

Living Life to the Fullest

by Kirsty Liddiard

The Living Life to the Fullest project, led by Dan Goodley, Kirsty Liddiard and Katherine Runswick-Cole, of the School of Education and iHuman, continues to go from strength to strength. Over the last few months, the team have held poetry workshops in young people’s hospices and started working on the Living Life to the Fullest Co-Production Toolkit.

The Toolkit

Living Life to the Fullest, and its Co-Researcher Collective of disabled young people, are now collaborating with Greenacre School – specifically Harry Gordon, SEN Teacher, and six Greenacre students – to co-design and create a “research toolkit”.

The Co-Production Toolkit aims to record and disseminate with others the team’s ways of working in co-production with disabled young people. In the last decade, ‘public bodies — from non-governmental organisations (NGOs) to national charitable organisations — have begun to produce their own guidance as to how to research with children and young people’ (Liddiard et al. 2018: 2). But the team have been left wondering: where are the voices and expertise of disabled children and young people?

Through the Toolkit, the Living Life to the Fullest team want to diversify their methods and practices of co-production to a broader demographic of young people: including young people with the labels of learning disability and autism, who are routinely omitted from the research process. They want to take an online and offline approach – with downloadable resources such as short films, podcasts, animations and templates co-created by co-researchers and student-collaborators. They also want to explore the possibilities of research as a learning practice for SEND pedagogy and politics. Ultimately, the team want the Toolkit to be used by youth workers, teachers, social work practitioners, academics, researchers, charities… the list is endless!

Telling Stories Through Poetry

Furthermore, on 21^st and 22^nd February 2019, Living Life to the Fullest researcher Kirsty Liddiard collaborated with Georgina Barney from the Attenborough Arts Centre, Stacey Curzon from Rainbows Children’s Hospice and professional poet and artist Sipho Ndlovu, University of Sheffield, to host two poetry workshops with disabled children and young people.

The first workshop was held at the Attenborough Arts Centre in Leicester, an arts centre that prides itself on being accessible and inclusive. The second was at Rainbows Children’s Hospice, which provides care and support for children and young people with life-limiting health conditions and disabilities, and their families. The aim of the workshops was to enable disabled children and young people to tell new stories of their experiences of disability through poetry and spoken word arts.

Sipho Ndopu, University of Sheffield, a spoken word artist and poet whose work explores disability, dyslexia and difference, led the workshops. Following some fun warm up activities, young participants were invited to explore creative responses to questions such as: How do you see yourself? What do you like doing? What brings you joy? Colourful responses were offered through drawing, poetry, dancing, iPad play, and performing for others.

Below is a poem, written in one of the workshops, by Natasha age 9,

My eyes are blue.

I’m pretty.

I’ve got long blonde hair.

I’m kind and happy.

I like myself.

Half of me is German.

It’s blurry because my eyes move.

I’m interesting.

I look like Mummy.

I look a bit like Daddy.

E is for Eggs.

And Sam, aged 13, wrote about the importance of intimacies with friends and family:

Sometimes I’m happy, sometimes I’m sad

I can be lazy but I do my best.

I think of others before myself, as I love my friends dearly.

I’m not the best at everything, but that’s fine,

I don’t need to be loved by everyone because I’m happy with who I do have.

I’m limited to what I can do because of my disability, but I keep my head high…

… Because I’m me, and that’s all that matters

These poems, and the many pieces of artwork created in the workshops, are powerful because disabled children and young people are rarely given space to express their thoughts, opinions and feelings, especially within the context of the arts. For us, the arts can generate a diversity of stories, countering the ‘single story’ of disability that routinely centres tragedy, particularly in the context of childhood. Thus, the arts can ‘voice another storyline’ of disability (Golden 1996: 330) – one of joy, self-esteem and creativity – centring the lives of young people with life-limiting and life-threatening impairments in this exclusion.

Living Life to the Fullest (ESRC), the arts-informed co-produced research project co-lead by the School of Education’s Dan Goodley, Katherine Runswick-Cole and Kirsty Liddiard, continues to go from strength to strength.

· To follow Living Life to the Fullest's lively blog, check out livinglifetothefullest.org

· If you have any questions or would like further information, please email Kirsty on k.liddiard@sheffield.ac.uk.