These postcards have been created at the aftermath of two online conversations between more than 30 students (eight to eighteen years old) and teachers of six schools across the UK in June and July 2020. The need for these conversations was born from a shared feeling of disconnection caused by lockdown.
Amid cross-national school closure in the UK, public conversations about children and schooling in COVID omitted to ask children about their experiences and how school was changing for them. Our two online conversations attempted to counter this trend of excluding children’s voices by valuing their experiences about the things they missed from school during COVID and those they wouldn’t like to return to.
In January 2021, I (Elina Moraitopoulou) invited a small group of children and adults who participated in these conversations to an online ideation session with the illustrator Ania Khazina. During that session, we decided on some of the key themes that emerged from our summer conversations and suggested ideas on how Ania could illustrate them. The idea of the postcards occurred to me some months later, both as a means to thank the children and adults for their valuable input (by posting some dozens of postcards back to the participating schools) and to keep the conversation going, this time offline. Each postcard features an illustrated theme that was raised by the children. The backside of each postcard cites some of their quotes and includes a prompt for other children to share their feelings and experiences on the respective topics. Sharing postcards is a great way to create and share memories with people we care about. You can download postcards in the PDF, print them on carton paper (A6 size) and gift them to children around you who you care about, and remind them that their memories matter.
The postcards were developed by POEM fellow Elina Moraitopoulou and illustrated by Ania Khazina.
