Look Who’s Talking:Using creative, playful arts-based methods in research with young children

Young children are often ignored or marginalised in the drive to address children’s participation and their wider set of rights. This is the case generally in social research, as well as within the field of Arts-Based Education Research. This article contributes to the growing literature on young children’s involvement in arts-based research, by providing a reflective account of our learning and playful engagement with children using creative methods. This small pilot project forms part of a larger international project titled Look Who’s Talking: Eliciting the Voices of Children from Birth to Seven, led by Professor Kate Wall at the University of Strathclyde. Visiting one nursery in Scotland, we worked with approximately 30 children from 3 to 5 years old. Seeking to connect with their play-based nursery experiences, we invited children to participate in a range of arts-based activities including drawing, craft-making, sculpting, a themed ‘play basket’ with various props, puppetry and videography. In this article, we develop reflective, analytical stories of our successes and dilemmas in the project. We were keen to establish ways of working with children that centred their own creativity and play, shaped by the materials we provided but not directed by us. However, we struggled to balance our own agenda with the more open-ended methods we had used. We argue that an intergenerational approach to eliciting voice with young children – in which adults are not afraid to shape the agenda, but do so in responsive, gradual and sensitive ways – creates the potential for a more inclusive experience for children that also meets researcher needs

Mediational tools in story construction: an investigation of cultural influences on children’s narratives

In this article we investigate how the content of children’s stories can provide insight into their cultural contexts. Informed by sociocultural theory, we use children’s narrative as a methodological tool for understanding the role of cultural influences in their construction of personal experiences and imaginary events. Twelve children in a year one class (five–six years) participated in pairs in three storytelling activities designed to draw on both imaginary scenarios and real world experiences. First, a picture was used as a stimulus and children were asked to formulate a story about what was happening in the image. Second, children were read the first part of a story book, and then asked to explain how they thought the story would finish. Finally, children were asked to recount an experience about a holiday they had been on. Thematic analysis of the stories illustrated how children utilized meditational tools to construct their narratives. Children’s imaginary capabilities were closely entwined with their own personal experiences and developmental context and they drew on beliefs and practices that were culturally situated. As a result we suggest that incorporating storytelling activities into early years classrooms can enable educators to develop a closer understanding of pupils’ cultural development, and provide researchers with a valuable methodological resource for studying sociocultural perspectives