Beating Time: Methodological Questions Arising From the Evaluation of a School-Based Arts Project

This article reflects on the evaluation of an innovative educational arts project at a primary school in Liverpool. Based on an animated film version of Janáček’s Cunning Little Vixen, an opera populated by animals, this child-led project was considered to be a successful endeavour. Yet there remain unanswered questions over how this success might be defined and indeed what conventional methods of evaluation research can hope to capture. The article draws on debates from the new wave of childhood studies and considers how some of the recent theoretical and methodological developments in this field, particularly around post-qualitative research, could and should influence the way that evaluation is carried out. Yet there are tensions between the complexities that these developments raise and the intention of evaluation which is to provide straightforward answers.