Prf Heather Montgomery

Montgomery and Woodhead will evaluate the Bamboo Project, funded by the Oak Foundation. The Bamboo Project is an international learning initiative to understand resilience in children exposed to sexual abuse and sexual exploitation. This proposal will examine: The overall learning strategy and its implementation in practice; Key processes involving relevant stakeholders at international and national levels, including the framing of the research, the resources allocated, the different processes and structures aimed at providing support and oversight at both local and global levels, and accompanying strategies for communication and learning; The local research projects in each of the selected countries, including their compliance with the guiding elements for the research outlined by the ISC, the contextualisation of the concepts and the potential for cross cultural application and learning offered by the design and implementation of each; The work of the ‘local’ research groups tasked with completing country reports including retrospectively reviewing compliance with ethical standards, the research design, data management and analysis, and explicitly including techniques for finding and interviewing children, and any implications from the resulting revisions to numbers and sub-groups, based on the realities found and documented during implementation of the research.

This project explores generational trajectories of the views, choices, and non-choices of children’s participation in economic activities and school education in South Korea where, after six decades of rapid economic growth, it is possible to examine several generations with very different childhood experiences. It will produce knowledge about the country where very little research has been conducted on the topic as well as findings that will inform wider international policy debates on the relationship between children’s work and school education in changing global and local environments. Methodologically it will also contribute to the growing theorisation on understanding childhoods through a broader life-course and generational lens. The project will involve fieldwork in two agricultural villages with populations with relatively diverse age groups. The fieldwork will involve interviews with adults of differing ages and children on a range of issues concerning the topic and the collection of contextual data to help interpret interview data.