Dr Nelli Stavropoulou

ALPHABETICA aims to provide effective solutions that allow children and young people at risk of poverty or social exclusion to access arts and arts-based education through co-creative participatory research actions. For some young people, access to ‘art’ is limited; often understood as a luxury or a leisure activity that may feel inaccessible or irrelevant. For others, their creative endeavours might not be recognised from their own perspective, as being ‘art’. ALPHABETICA will carry out 12 pilot actions across 8 European countries aimed at enhancing the transformative effect of active participation in community-driven artistic co-creation activities. Collectively, the research pilot actions cover a range of school settings and out-of-school community settings with children from 3 to 18, as well as young people and adults of various ages. The project is informed by a synthesis of theories of youth participatory action research, Theory of Change, pedagogies of care, love and enchantment, pedagogies of past, present and the imagined future, and the more-than-human approach. This conceptual framework invites a reflexive and in-depth exploration of children and young people’s complex everyday realities, while offering opportunities for creative self-expression and meaning-making, participation, skills-development, and relationship-building. ALPHABETICA will take a transformative approach by: • providing qualitative and quantitative data on attitudes towards and perceptions of arts by children, families, educators and policymakers, • using participatory and caring approaches and pedagogies to provide an evidence-based assessment of the instrumental outcomes of arts-based education, their transformative impact, and their transferability to children and young people’s other life domains, • taking and teaching a caring approach that through arts-based education will sustain a commitment to lifelong learning, • providing evidence-based recommendations for policy action. The project is led by Prof Rachele Antonini from the University of Bologna (Italy) The UK Team are Prof Sarah Crafter and Dr. Nelli Stavropoulou (The Open University) and Prof Guida de Abreu (Oxford Brookes University). Together they oversee Work Package 4 and undertake the pilot action ‘Our Caring World through Art’.