A carnival can not be stopped!

A design pedagogical study of children and norms

In Basel, the only Protestant carnival in Europe takes place. The carnival is called Fasnacht. For three days, there is a wild and uninhibited play with tradition, crossing borders and social criticism.

The aim of this thesis is to expand the understanding of the concept of the carnival, and how to use it for an educational purpose. Three children from Basel have been involved in an workshop where they designed and talked about norms and power structures through the carnivalesque principle. The study is based on the questions: How can you use the carnival as a starting point for designing and talking about norms and power structures together with children? And; How can the design process support such a project? To spot this, I made arrangements for a design educational project. Based on the carnival and through the design educational project, the three children got the opportunity to let Barbie dolls go on their own carnival. The methods underlying the project is transforming design and a concept the pedagogue Paulo Friere called a Visual Voice. The workshop with the Barbie dolls became the children's visual voice - a designed figure that the children could talk about, and reflect about how they for example create their gender identity, and why the colour pink is a girl colour. During the project, the empirical material was collected in the form of field notes, log books, photographs and the children's self-designed Barbie dolls. The empirical data were then analysed and interpreted through a queer theory and by Mikhail Bakhtin's carnivalesque concepts. The study also opinions that children's play is an important factor for children's learning, and the children's play is later discussed through the carnevalesque principle.

The study is portrayed at Konstfack, in the room Biblioteksgången, between 2014-01-13 and 2014 - 01-17. The artistic representation tries to highlight the children's experience of the carnival, my experience of Switzerland, and show something I found in the study, namely that the colour pink is loaded with various notions that can be linked to girls' identity..