Becoming a member of the classroom: supporting children’s participation as informants in research

ABSTRACT

Engaging with children as research informants and supporting their participation in research is increasingly recognised as valuing children’s views on matters that affect them. Less attention, however, is given to the ways in which children co-construct and manage their participation in child–researcher interactions. Drawing on sociology of childhood understandings, such as the social competence of young children, this ethnographic study investigated the co-production of child–researcher interactions with children aged five years in their first year of primary schooling in Australia. Findings show how child participants oriented to and managed the researcher’s disruption of the everyday generational order of child–adult relations. In so doing, interactional space was created for the co-production of children as expert informants who then oriented to a social order of membership inclusion produced in child–researcher interactions. Creating interactional spaces provides enhanced opportunities for children’s participation as informants in research, and in child–adult interactions across social structures.

KEYWORDS:

• Child–adult relations
• children as participants
• children’s competence
• generational order
• social membership
• research with children

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Helen Breathnach http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9445-481X

Susan Danby http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1944-7043

Lyndal O’Gorman http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6860-6784