Centre for Early Childhood Development

On the “stoep” at CECD, Sylvia van der Weide, Carlos Pacheco, Ayushka Shrestha, Carley Dykstra, and Jackson Baker

In an effort to celebrate childhood as an important life stage, the Centre for Early Childhood Development is opening the Cape Town Museum of Childhood. To assist in the museum’s development, this project collected childhood narratives from people in the Western Cape province for a museum display. Generational (n=4), photo-prompted (n=14), digital (n=5), and unstructured (n=3) interviews were conducted. Themes of race, education, economic hardship, family dynamics, lack of freedom, and safety concerns emerged from the narratives. We developed an online Digital Story Toolkit to continue to collect stories from people in South Africa. In addition, we proposed different display options for the narratives collected, guided by observations of museums and consultations with museum technicians.

Children of Cape Town: Using Narratives to Celebrate Childhood in Cape Town, South Africa