What we did

Eye to Eye’s main aim is to develop, in collaboration with secondary school teachers, engaging and participatory classroom resources on the various issues connected to child labour.

Having gathered the photos and stories from young workers and collaborated with teachers to develop teaching resources and pilot them, we are now finalising them to fit in with the new 2008 National Curriculum. Many of these are already up in the Resources section of this site.

Our new colour report

Eye to Our project book for teachers, entitled "Through a lens: experience and learning from the Eye to Eye project" is now out and you can read it here. Ask for us for a hard copy if you want one.

How the project developed

Eye to Eye was a three-year project running from April 2006 to March 2009.

The first phase of the project was to facilitate working children and adolescents to record their own experiences in words and photographs. These children have all experienced different kinds of work and are connected to projects supported by Save the Children; the types of work include market work, carpet weaving and child domestic work. We worked with local photographers and local organisations responding to the issue of child labour.

In the second phase of the project we developed a network of teachers, across a range of curriculum subjects, who began to participate in the project. They did so by developing resources that explore the lives of these child workers and address many issues connected to the photos, captions and testimonies of the children.

In the third phase of the project, teachers piloted the teaching materials, and schools already involved have been encouraged to deepen their involvement through increasing the numbers of staff involved and through assemblies or other project-linked events.

The final phase was to disseminate the finished resource – a resource that both coheres with the new National Curriculum and promotes a global dimension in teaching. These Eye to Eye teaching materials engage learners and provide an accessible entry point for students into some crucial global issues of their generation.

Child participation is a very important theme, both for Save the Children and the Eye to Eye project, allowing working children to offer their perspectives about the world in which they live as well as encouraging students in the UK to be active learners and to respond personally to their experiences and learning.