Based in our conviction of the importance of finding ways to listen to children we have been driven to develop new kinds of research tools and methods. In our early work on the naturalistic study of children in their everyday environment we found little guidance from the fields of psychology anthropology or sociology and had to explore the use of new ways of enabling children to communicate just how much they knew to us (see Roger Hart’s Children’s Experience of Place and Cindi Katz’s Sow What you Know”). We subsequently became convinced of the multiple benefits of conducting research with children rather than just about children and began developing methods to enable children to collaborate with us in evaluating their communities and environments.

See also:

• The three participation issues of the Childhood City Newsletter
• Roger Hart’s book, Children’s Participation
• The West Farms open space planning project
• uMap! the Community
• Child Friendly Places
• The Article 15 Project