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Our background
During the course of our research members of the Children and WorldViews Project team have had conversations with about 200 children aged from 5 to 11. These children have told us about their lives, their relationships and their perceptions of the world they live in.

Where do the stories come from?
We have taken the records of these conversations and, removing the voice of the 'interviewer', we have produced stories or narratives that reflect what the children think. The stories are still told in the children's own words and cover a range of topics.

Why are these stories important?
The children who have told these stories to us wanted us to know about the experiences, things and people who were important to them. Sometimes they had not told these stories to anyone before. Often these were not things that they told to adults. We want other children and adults to read these stories and respond to them because this helps us all understand and communicate with one another. We believe that by doing this we actually make the world and the society that we live in.

Our invitation to you
Some of these stories are themselves responses to other children's stories and we would like to invite you to join in this process by reading the stories and giving us your own narrative/story in response.

What are these stories for?
We want to analyse the way in which people respond to one another when talking about important aspects of their lives. We have found in our research that sometimes we do not respond openly to one another because of age differences, professional roles or because of other differences and the fear of being vulnerable or misunderstood.

When we have spoken to children in schools we have tried to create a trusting environment in which they feel able to share their narratives. By doing this we have found that a different sort of communication takes place.

We are asking you to help us in developing and understanding this process of open communication. We are interested in the differences that occur when people share their own narratives openly - regardless of the age, gender, ethnicity and other differences that we encounter.

We are particularly interested in adults trying to respond in this way to children and identifying how this affects adult-child relationships. Children and young people have told us that adults often don't really listen to or respect what they have to say.

When we have shown children's stories to teenagers and adults without telling them the age of the storyteller they often think he or she is much older than they are. We are interested in what can happen when we remove the presuppositions that are often barriers to positive communication.

As this process develops on this website we shall be placing further narratives for people to respond to, which are themselves responses to other stories. We will not give any indication of the particulars of the storyteller, apart from a first name and the story they have told.

The project hopes to incorporate your contributions in its ongoing work with teachers, children, young people and other researchers. We have found that encouraging this sort of communication enables a more creative, open and democratic educational and social environment. By setting up this interactive stories website we want to develop this further. Your contribution will help this to happen.

Anonymity of respondents will be ensured at all times.

Your response to any of our stories will be received by the Children and WorldViews Project team. We may wish to incorporate the responses we receive into this website. If you do not want your response to be used in this way you will be able to say so in your response form. Material received and placed on this website with your permission, by the CWVP, becomes their property and they will hold the publishing rights and copyright to all material.