Research: Young People, Freedom of Expression and Being Heard
Seen and Heard investigated how children aged 10–14 in Malta, Berlin and Wrocław understand and experience freedom of expression and children’s rights, and how literature, storytelling and other media can support their capacity to participate meaningfully in the worlds around them.
The research began from a simple but consequential distinction: having a right to speak does not necessarily mean experiencing oneself as heard. The project therefore examined not only children’s awareness of rights, but also the relationships, institutional structures and cultural practices that shape whether their views can be expressed, recognised and acted upon.
Across the three countries, the research combined questionnaires, literature-based workshops, qualitative observation and educator input. Rather than treating the national cohorts as statistically interchangeable, the analysis attended to the particular social, linguistic and educational contexts in which children were participating.
Research at a Glance
3
countries
9
Schools
596
children reached
Questionnaire One: 527 participants · Engaging with Literature workshops: 519 participants · Questionnaire Two: 453 participants
Malta provided the largest and most nationally diverse cohort, including children representing 48 nationalities. Berlin brought two highly multilingual and socioeconomically diverse school communities into the research. In Wrocław, Polish and Ukrainian children participated within a school environment that already included a student-ombudsperson structure.
Research Design and Methodology
The research was designed as more than a survey of children’s attitudes. It created a repeated process of listening, literary engagement and reflection.
Questionnaire One explored children’s understanding of human and children’s rights, freedom of expression, the issues that concern them, whether they feel listened to, their experiences of speaking up, and the role of books and media in helping them understand social questions.
The Engaging with Literature workshops then used children’s and young adult literature as a mediated space for dialogue. Through word association, small-group discussion, the Amnesty Story Explorer, picturebooks and collaborative worksheets, participants explored questions of rights, inequality, belonging, safety, protest, the environment and children’s agency. Literature enabled difficult issues to be approached without requiring children to disclose personal experiences directly.
Questionnaire Two returned to key themes after the workshops, allowing the research teams to explore changes in understanding and attitude while also recognising the limitations of simple before-and-after comparison. The cohorts were not identical in every phase, baseline rights awareness was already substantial in some areas, and the three national settings differed considerably. Findings were therefore interpreted contextually rather than treated as evidence of simple causal change.
Qualitative observations, children’s written reflections, educator perspectives and discussions during the workshops provided a further layer of evidence.
What the Research Found
Rights awareness was substantial, but uneven
Across the three countries, many children demonstrated a strong general awareness of human and children’s rights. However, understanding was less consistent in areas including bodily autonomy and freedom of expression. The findings suggested that knowing that rights exist does not automatically mean understanding how they operate in everyday relationships and institutions.
Children valued expression but did not always experience themselves as heard
Children consistently regarded being able to express their views as important. At the same time, many described adult listening as conditional. The research therefore identified an important distinction between being invited to speak and experiencing one’s contribution as respected, recognised or consequential.
Recognising injustice did not always lead to speaking up
Participants demonstrated considerable sensitivity to unfairness and exclusion. They raised issues ranging from peer relationships, bullying and inappropriate adult behaviour to racism, antisemitism, disability, gender equality, children’s rights, war, environmental destruction, excessive construction and deaths on construction sites.
Yet the willingness or ability to speak did not necessarily follow from this awareness. Fear of adults’ reactions, lack of trust, power imbalances and uncertainty about whether speaking would make a difference all shaped participation.
As one child wrote:
“I don’t trust anyone enough to speak up.”
Another explained that they sometimes remained silent because:
“Adults get angry.”
These responses became particularly important to the wider Seen and Heard project because they shifted attention from the expectation that children should simply become more confident speakers towards the responsibility of adults and institutions to become more trustworthy listeners.
Media and stories mattered
Films and social media were important routes through which participants encountered social and political issues. Books remained significant when children found them engaging and connected to questions that mattered in their lives. The research also suggested potential for games and other interactive media within children’s rights education.
The literature workshops demonstrated the particular value of mediated storytelling. Stories allowed participants to think through complex questions of discrimination, displacement, war, climate change, equality, belonging and protest while retaining enough imaginative distance for discussion to remain safe.
Literature could connect fictional worlds with lived social questions
A particularly significant pattern was the way literary engagement encouraged children to connect stories with wider social realities. In Malta, for example, the proportion of respondents who said fiction reflected real life increased from 17.3% before the workshops to 47.2% afterwards. In Questionnaire Two, 67.2% said fiction could help them understand other people and 57.9% agreed that young people could make a difference by speaking up.
These figures are site-specific rather than pooled across the three countries, but they illustrate a wider pattern evident across the project: literature became a space through which children could connect narrative, rights and social experience.
Voice proved relational
One of the project’s most important conclusions was that voice cannot be understood solely as an individual capacity.
Children may possess confidence, knowledge and a willingness to speak, but meaningful participation also depends on the environments around them: whether adults listen, whether schools provide credible routes for response, whether difficult issues can be discussed safely, and whether children see evidence that speaking can have consequences.
Freedom of expression therefore emerged from the research not only as an individual right, but as a relational and institutional practice.
These figures are site-specific rather than pooled across the three countries, but they illustrate a wider pattern evident across the project: literature became a space through which children could connect narrative, rights and social experience.
From Comparative Research to a Postmigrant European Learning Ecology
The research took place in classrooms shaped by mobility, multilingualism, migration and multiple cultural histories. These were not simply diverse populations occupying the same physical space. They were environments in which different memories, experiences, languages and understandings of belonging continually came into relation.
Seen and Heard therefore understands the postmigrant classroom as a learning ecology: a space in which multiple histories can be brought into dialogue, shared classrooms can become spaces of encounter, collective storytelling can generate shared meaning, and intergenerational exchange can sustain learning and belonging.
Collective agency emerges not by erasing difference, but by creating relationships through which difference can become part of a shared civic world.
Three Situated Research Contexts
Malta
Research took place across six schools representing the State, Church and Independent sectors. Questionnaire One reached 417 children, 345 participated in 24 Engaging with Literature workshops, and 354 completed Questionnaire Two.
The cohort represented 48 nationalities, making questions of migration, language, belonging and the postmigrant classroom particularly significant.
The children demonstrated strong awareness of relational, environmental and political issues. Their responses included concerns about family and peer relationships, discrimination, bullying, children being excluded from decision-making, racism, antisemitism, disability, gender equality, environmental degradation, excessive construction and deaths on construction sites.
The Maltese findings also revealed a significant gap between concern and participation: 70% of respondents reported that they had not previously spoken up about an issue, while 30% said they had.
When children faced problems, parents or caregivers and friends were substantially more important sources of support than formal institutional figures. This reinforced one of the wider findings of the research: trust, safety and relationship are central to whether children speak.
Berlin
The Berlin research involved two highly multilingual and socioeconomically diverse State schools. 62 children completed Questionnaire One, 131 participated in the literature workshops and 60 completed Questionnaire Two.
The research was adapted to the particular linguistic and social contexts of the participating schools. Questions of privacy, pseudonymity, belonging, discrimination and representation became particularly important.
The Berlin strand also created a bridge into higher education. University students worked directly with primary-school pupils, while subsequent university seminars embedded the project’s participatory approaches within teacher education and academic reflection.
Wroclaw
The Wrocław research took place at Maria Dąbrowska Primary School No. 1 and included Polish and Ukrainian participants. 48 children completed Questionnaire One, 43 participated in the Engaging with Literature workshops and 39 completed Questionnaire Two.
The research was supported by research assistants, statistical expertise and a psychologist, allowing quantitative findings to be considered alongside the relational and psychosocial dimensions of children’s participation.
The presence of an established student-ombudsperson structure provided an important contextual point of comparison for questions of participation, institutional listening and children’s access to formal mechanisms for raising concerns.
What the Research Changed
The research was never intended to end with data collection.
What children said shaped the later stages of Seen and Heard. Concerns about adult listening, discrimination, bullying, racism, environmental degradation, belonging, fairness and children’s capacity to influence decisions travelled into Human Rights Education, artistic mentoring, filmmaking, animation, poetry, illustration, zine-making, publishing and intergenerational dialogue.
Children subsequently worked with filmmakers, artists, poets, storytellers, Human Rights Education specialists, theatre practitioners, researchers and university students to transform concerns into creative and public forms.
The project therefore moved from researching children’s experiences of voice towards asking what happens when institutions create sustained conditions for children to make, circulate and discuss their own cultural and civic work.
Explore the next stages of this process:
From Research to Movement: A Relational Storywork Ecology
As Seen and Heard developed, research, creative practice and civic participation increasingly appeared not as separate stages but as parts of a recursive ecology.
Attunement
begins with care, attention and deep listening.
Co-creation
allows concerns and experiences to acquire narrative, visual and artistic form through shared storywork.
Circulation
moves those forms beyond the immediate workshop and into schools, cultural institutions, festivals, publishing, universities and public dialogue.
Sedimentation
describes what remains: changed relationships, memories, teaching practices, institutional routines, resources, networks and expectations about whose voices matter.
Sedimentation is not an endpoint. What remains creates the conditions for renewed listening and further action.
Within this model, storywork becomes more than a way of representing children’s citizenship. It can become infrastructure for citizenship: a means through which experience becomes shared concern, shared concern acquires cultural form, and cultural expression can begin to change relationships and institutions.
Download the public research report
Being Seen and Heard: Children, Freedom of Expression and Literature in Malta, Berlin and Wrocław
For researchers: The full detailed comparative research report, including complete national analyses, figures and methodological appendices, is also available here.
The final comparative report presents the complete research undertaken in Malta, Berlin and Wrocław, including the research methodology, national and comparative findings, Engaging with Literature workshops, post-intervention evaluation, discussion and recommendations.
The report also includes the books used during the workshops, the Seen and Heard workshop materials and a sample Listening Agreement.
Academic Publications and Research Legacy
The research continues through academic publication, university teaching and further international collaboration.
Published
Schulz, F. (2026). “Seen & Heard: Heranwachsende mit literarischen Texten zur Meinungsfreiheit empowern”. In M. Kißling and K. Weiser-Zurmühlen (Eds.), Demokratiebildung als Querschnittsaufgabe der Deutschdidaktik. SLLD-B (Sprachlich-literarisches Lernen und Deutschdidaktik – Bände).
Submitted
Deszcz-Tryhubczak, J., Fenech, G., and Schulz, F. “Storied Citizenship in the Postdigital Times: The Seen and Heard Project as a Case Study in Children’s Social Movement Praxis.” Submitted for the edited volume Storied Citizenship and designated for open-access publication.
Fenech, G. (2026). “Children’s Literature and the Politics of Voice: Rights, Participation, and Youth Agency in Postmigrant Classrooms in Malta.” Submitted to Children & Society; under editorial evaluation.
In development
Two further project publications are in preparation.
The project has also generated the proposed open-access edited collection Seen and Heard: Co-creating Value-based Social Movements with Young People. Its sixteen substantive chapters extend the project’s conceptual work into international conversations about children’s literature, publishing, education, citizenship, migration, care, conflict, climate action and youth participation.
Explore the Research in Practice
The research forms the foundation for the wider Seen and Heard project.
By Kids For Kids
In Seen and Heard, we didn’t just discuss! We drew, wrote, composed, filmed, edited, and interviewed various people while also growing in our role as active citizens.
Creative protest films
Across three countries and three schools, we used film to explore the things that are most important to us.
Questioning the Grown-Ups
In Malta, Wroclaw and Berlin we asked grown-ups questions about our opportunities in society and how we can be more active citizens as we grow up.
Human rights education
Human Rights Education (HRE), is vital to the realisation of rights. It is a lifelong learning process that helps us respect and stand up for each other.
Hear our voices
Hear Our Voices is a unique children’s book that brings together the ideas and concerns of 600 children of over 50 nationalities who took part in Seen and Heard workshops.
Docu-Narrative
In a series of videos we explain our interdisciplinary and cross-sectoral EU initiative where human rights, art, education, and activism converge.
Archive
Seen and Heard is attracting attention in academic institutions across Europe.
Our archive shows how our work has been reported in different European countries.
