Assignment Task:

The purpose of this assignment is for you to critically consider your own life experience growing up, particularly reflecting on your early years from birth to eight years old. Reflect on your family/cultural practices, beliefs, ideologies, and the adult-child relationships (power relations) that dominated your childhood experiences. Consider the opportunities or lack thereof for agency and voice, and the consideration of rights. You should incorporate some of the key theoretical concepts introduced in the lectures and tutorials relating to gender, sexuality, identity, family, culture, ethnicity, class, environment, education, health, religion, and language. Comment on the positioning of the child image in relation to your childhood experience and the experience of contemporary childhood.

Incorporate photographs, movies, or drawings from your past (i.e., Kinder photographs, a picture or map of your house/street), stories from other family members, and draw on news, music, and other popular cultural icons from that period to put your story into context. Compare your own childhood with that of contemporary childhoods and include media/artifacts that support the comparison between the two.

It requires you to present a reflective essay, NOT a biography, thoughtfully integrating literature (to support your critical discussion) from weekly readings, the textbook, and theoretical concepts relating to childhood, diversity, and difference introduced in this unit.

In order to complete this assignment, you need to:

Conduct research that focuses on contemporary society during the time when you were a child (birth - eight years).