practical peer review 1

questions raised:

what is the proposed outcome

• a body of work created by children as a response to a series of taught sessions on protest art
• a series of simple protest posters that could communicate to a younger/wider audience and reflect issues that are important to young people 

are the children involved in the final result?

• the two final results are the posters which will either work directly with children, or my own body of work and protest posters I have created which will focus on communicating effectively to children specifically

will the community get to experience the work?

• ideally the final work will be a free publication downloadable online and available to have printed as multiple copies and displayed throughout a range of communities or used for other community purposes. 
• the work with the school will pass down a level of understanding skills and knowledge for the possibility of children engaging with protest art independently after I have left

do children need to know about these issues?

• This was a very helpful question as I had taken for granted my stance on the topic and this helped me to realise the importance of arguing that younger audiences should be engaged in protest art and made me do more research to back up this opinion which will strengthen my essay
• if children care about, engage with and understand social issues such as environmentalism then they are more likely to put pressure on their parents to recycle for example. if children are aware of social issues they can be very effective in engaging other people as their work shows they speak often kindly, clearly and plainly and this naivety often elicits an empathetic response in adults. 
• the earlier children learn the earlier they can make informed positive decisions about social change.
• it is arguable that the topics spoken about are to 'depressing' or 'heavy' for children to worry about, but children are often exposed to these issues in real life more often than we realise and by teaching about them we actually often eliminate the fear that surrounds them. Especially if we teach about these things positively, for example in my lessons I focused on positive language and affirmations. I did not show the children horrible pictures of war and graphic violence but instead we had discussions about the importance of friendship and equality. If we focus on spreading peace and the importance and benefits of this then by default we eliminate war as an acceptable and viable concept.
• if we teach we eliminate a culture of fear - and this is true over all generations. If we arm people with the tools to have a voice in society and make positive change then we eliminate the feeling of hopelessness and futility.
• if children learn about the ancient greeks, world war two and the vikings then surely they can learn about martin Luther king jr, Ghandi and how they themselves can be involved in peaceful protest modern day
• They are studying the world, struggling to learn the rules of engagement. Except that, for them, life doesn't make sense because their instincts are negated. So they begin to twist in an attempt to accommodate a world full of half-truths.
• by not explaining the situation properly, we somehow neglected to make it clear that I was so ill because of the treatment rather than the disease. That was enormous
  Ghosts always reads to me as a play about the futility of attempting to suppress difficult truths – how it does the opposite of rendering them powerless. The unsaid festers and grows until it infects everyone with poison
  I asked a counsellor who works at Great Ormond Street hospital with young transplant patients how he handles talking to very ill children and traumatised families. "There are parents who can't even bear to tell a child he'll be operated on the next day," he said. "And that's really damaging. They think they're protecting the child, but what they're really doing is protecting themselves from their own appalling fear of loss."
• If you don't talk to kids about the difficult stuff, they worry alone.
  Give a child an unpalatable truth and she will figure out a way to process it. But "protect" her and the ghosts will whisper in her ear.guardian article
• If we're going to end these things, we need to be honest about their existences and have tough conversations, so that our children demand better for themselves and from themselves. source
• How honest can an author be with an auditorium full of elementary school kids? How honest should we be with our readers? Is the job of the writer for the very young to tell the truth or preserve innocence? source