The arts empower children to make sense of the world and their rights. That’s why we must do more to support access to creative experiences from the earliest age

Call 24 offers a strong foundation for active citizenship in the future, argues Media Education's Iain Shaw

The power of identity and belonging

Who am I? How do I know who I am? Why does anyone like me? How can I defend myself against rejection?

We never finish searching for the answers to these kind of big questions. It takes everyone a lifetime. The individual and collective stories we both hear and tell are powerful because they shape our ever-evolving individual and collective senses of identity and belonging.

Acceptance of identity and negotiating belonging are at the centre of how we understand who we are as individuals and what we understand the wider society to be. We need to recognise that these acceptances, and the negotiations around them, are political. They are political in two senses:

1. In relation to our views about social relationships that involve power or authority, and
2. In the hegemony and discourses that are dominant in the ways that we think about ourselves (or others) and how we are valued or treated.

So, to exist is to be political. The world is unequal and unjust so we are all affected by partisan interest and political ideology. We experience these as combinations of privilege and entitlement and inequality and discrimination. These contexts show that, by existing, our children and young people are part of that political world too.

Of course, our children and young people have rights through legislation such as the UNCRC. For example, Article 12 states that children and young people have a right to have their voices heard and to be included in decisions which directly affect their lives.

But, what prepares them to exercise these rights? Is it even possible to exercise your rights if you don’t know who you are, what you think or how you belong? It is very difficult to meaningfully exercise your rights if you don’t know where you fit in to your family, your community or your society. And, if you don’t know who you are or what you want to say, how can you be taken seriously – how do you count?

We need time and space for children and young people to explore who they are and to find reasons to accept and even learn to like themselves. This is why creativity and arts should be seen as core curriculum at the earliest age.

Children and young people need the means to come to terms with who they are as people and to generate sufficient resilience to recognise their own legitimacy and their right to independent views.