Children writing ethnography: children's perspectives and nomadic thinking in researching school classrooms

Abstract

This article makes a connection between narrative ethnography, childhood studies and new materialist theories in studying children's perspective on school. It presents ‘children writing ethnography’ as an approach based on complexity and involving participatory research. The question of ‘what is happening in the classroom’ is explored through writings produced in class by 10-year olds. The ‘messy’ ethnographic data are examined within the framework of narrative ethnography using the idea of ‘small stories’ that capture everyday interaction. Furthermore, both material and embodied meanings in the writings are discussed. New materialist theories and the idea of nomadic make it possible to account for the connectivity between the writings, the classroom reality, the child-ethnographers and the research, which are seen as mutually producing one another. The author suggests that engaging with children's free-flowing ethnographic writing serves as a productive way to conduct participatory ethnographic research, as well as to investigate contemporary childhoods in all their complexity.

Keywords:

• children's perspective
• classroom
• narrative
• nomadic
• participatory
• children writing ethnography

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. All the names of the research participants and some other details have been changed. The quotations from the classroom diaries have been written on separate lines in order to improve readability.

2. The excerpts from classroom diaries have been translated into English by Johannes Ihamuotila (9) and Anna Ihamuotila (11).

3. Storycrafting (Karlsson 2013) is a narrative method that has been used since the 1990s in both research and in various educational and societal settings.

4. In the context of school, the approach was called ‘classroom diaries’. In this article, based on new materialism, it is conceptualised as ‘children writing ethnography’.

5. This specific diary entry belongs to a child who did not want to participate in the study.

6. The Ŏ symbols in this text are originally the Macintosh ‘Apple’ symbols.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Academy of Finland [grant number 1134911] (research project TelLis, Children tell of their well-being – who listens? Listening to children's voices and receiving their stories], the Jenny and Antti Wihuri Foundation and the Finnish Cultural Foundation.