The emotional landscapes of school: Children’s journeys through time and space

This paper takes as its focus a public engagement project with children from two primary schools in West Yorkshire; a project that foregrounded experiences of school life in the past and the present. More particularly it examines how the children portrayed their feelings about different places within their schools’ landscapes through the creation of emotion maps, and how the temporal dynamics of their maps differed across the two schools. Through its interrogation of these differences, the presentation illustrates the importance of attending not only to the child’s voice in creative methods but also the wider institutional, social and cultural contexts in which those voices occur. In this, discussion is grounded in and informed by debates about the ambiguities and limits of the child’s voice in childhood research (Komulainen 2007; Spyrou 2011) and the productive challenges of listening to children’s silences in spoken and non-spoken data (Mazzei 2003; Spyrou 2015).