Methodological considerations in child-centered research about social difference and children experiencing difficulties at school

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the ethical and methodological significance for children and university researchers to participate together in data collection and research interpretation. We examine this process in the context of a three-year study with the aim of understanding how children become identified as having difficulties in a diverse, semi-urban minority French-speaking Catholic elementary school in Ontario (Canada). First, we review the literature on child informed consent. Then, we describe the setting and the process of how children in this study became informed participants. We describe how the children became active in exercising their discretionary consent to be observed during the data collection process, then how they progressively became engaged in observing their social context in terms of their own sense-making of the research project. We discuss how the children gave a new direction to the original project proposed by the university research team investigating on identification and special needs children. Lastly, we revisit the ways in which we addressed the various subject positions that became possible for us and for the children as co-researchers within the social relations of the classroom-based research team in a French minority language school. It became apparent throughout the research that informing consent was more than an act on the part of researchers to explain and thus establish a research framework in which collecting data from children would take place. Rather, we found that our research with children involved children's active participation as co-researchers informing the project from its design to its data analysis.