Understanding Children’s Rights and the UN Sustainable Development Goals through Play: A Scan of Existing Educational SDG Resources

Tracy Smith-Carrier et al. was granted Research and Professional Development funding for research studying children’s perspectives of their rights and realization of Sustainable Development Goals.

This research undergirds a multi-phased Participatory Action Research (Minkler, 2000) study aimed at exploring how children’s perspectives of their rights intersect with their understandings of realizing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Informed by an ethics of care lens, focusing on attention and empathy (Noddings, 2012), and a constructivist orientation (Mashford-Scott et al., 2012), highlighting the subjective and socially constructed nature of children’s experiences, in this phase we will scan existing educational SDG-oriented games (Rodrigo et al., 2021) to identify and test one to be adapted to local contexts for children (ages 8-12) in the Global South (Uganda, Tanzania) and North (Canada).