Compassionate Projects and Children's Civic Engagement: The Case of Bumble and His Bears

• In Event: Care and Compassion in Educational Settings: Cultural-Historical Perspectives

Abstract

This study focuses on an under-researched aspect of children’s civic engagement, compassionate projects. Children’s compassionate projects are child initiated and child lead activities that can focus on addressing issues like children in long-term hospital care, feeding the homeless or environmental questions.

Over the last decades children and youth have turned away from conventional forms of civic activities to alternative forms of engagement (Syvertsen et al., 2011). In contrast to forms of representational democracy (e.g., joining political youth organisations), youth prefer participatory civic engagement, like community service and volunteering. Youth also report that this has a higher impact on their civic learning than formal education. An important form of this political engagement are personally resonant activities, such as compassionate projects. While some research on them exists, the current literature is thin on questions like what leads children and youth to engage agentically in civic matters in this way and how is this engagement sustained. Answering such questions can unlock important insights into children and youth’s formative experiences regarding their civic engagement.

In this study I focus on compassionate projects from a cultural-historical activity theory perspective (Engeström 1987) and conceptualize them as ensembles of concerted actions in contrast to more established societal activities. Moreover, I understand children’s compassionate projects as emerging and being sustained by children’s agency and supported by the social and material settings of their everyday lives. Following Leont’ev (1978) I take compassionate projects as being more complex endeavours than the desires and ideas that initially sparked them. As such, compassionate projects are efforts under continuous reconstruction and discovery of the objects and motives that strive to be realized. This motion is possible because of how the social and material support provided by others helps the children and youth push toward possibilities seen-but-not-yet-realized with their project.

To support these claims, I will draw on a digital ethnography (Pink, 2016) of a Tasmanian compassionate project by Cambell Remess who, since the age of nine, has been making teddy bears for children in long term hospital care. During this time, the project has expanded from a personal effort supported by his immediate family to a formal charity organization led by Cambell and which, for example, organizes fundraising for cancer research. My results will show how Cambell enacted his agency to create, stabilize and develop his compassionate project. More specifically, my analysis will show how the project found its focus after an exploratory period where Cambell tried out making different artifacts for children in long-term hospital care before landing on crafting teddy bears. This could tentatively be called a period of anticipatory directionality (Miettinen, 2014) where the object of the project has not yet been fully stabilized. I will also show how the project developed into a more stable and formalized charity activity with various ways to show compassion toward children in long-term hospital care and their families. I will also discuss the potential impact of these findings for understanding children’s civic engagement.

Author

• Jaakko Hilppö, University of Helsinki