Beyond the focus group: Two approaches to widening participation co-creation

Wickremasinghe, Roshana and Merivale, Clare (2024) Beyond the focus group: Two approaches to widening participation co-creation (Co-constructing Education for All) The Forum for Access and Continuing Education 10pp.

Abstract

This chapter explores the extensive complications that arise from a lack of clear direction regarding a cocreative way of working, before attempting to provide a much-needed definition. By exploring the literature and evidence that surrounds co-creation, several clear gaps have been identified, including within a school or professional services environment, which helps situate our two projects – the Student Advisory Board and Youth Consultant Project – within the wider field of co-creation. With our experiences of managing these projects, we offer our perspective on the benefits of tailoring co-creative methods to specific projects and offer examples of best practice for working in this way, while acknowledging existing challenges and barriers and suggesting ways to overcome these. We finish with a series of tiered recommendations – for the sector, for institutions, and for practitioners – that will allow this way of working to become more than just a tokenistic box-ticking exercise, and for student experiences to truly become the centre of how we all
work.

This record has no associated files available for download.

Contributors

Download statistics