Learning with children: Power Feeling Freedom Dreams

Dunya will be speaking on some key concepts, for example symbiotic theories of evolution, the carrier bag theory of fiction, and the tyranny of structurelessness that influenced the approach taken in Power Feeling Freedom Dreams, 2024 – which is the culmination of 6 child-led sessions exploring children’s power, children’s voice, and the emotional experiences of political struggle. The event is an open invitation to discuss how we might harness and promote the power that children hold.

In their afterschool club, Dunya was struck by how frequently children had been drawing, writing and talking about Palestine, and their feelings of injustice in this political climate. The project became a space to take the childrens’ behaviour and anxieties seriously, offering them a way to translate their emotions into drawings on paper, fabric and eventually make banners. ‘Dreams’, ‘rage’, ‘big feelings’ and ‘small feelings’ were some of the prompts given to children to demonstrate their own energy, ideas, issues, struggles, frustrations, hopes and desires with the materials provided.

The project is also shaped by Dunya’s current PhD research on learning from symbiotic forms of life as a strategy for dehierarchising age and species relationships in spaces of learning and collaboration (Becoming-like-lichen: (re)learning symbiosis through intergenerational, interspecies collaboration.)

There will be a workshop element offering attendees an opportunity to try out some of the methodologies used in the sessions.