Child as method: implications for decolonising educational research

Abstract

This paper advances an approach, ‘child as method’, as a resource for interrogating models of development in childhood and education. Kuan-Hsing Chen’s (2010) book Asia as method has generated interest across childhood and educational studies. Here ‘child as method’ is presented as a related intervention. Just as Asia as method (re)considers the status of the national and transnational, so ‘child as method’ helps explicate the ways ‘child’ and ‘development’ are linked across economic, sociocultural and individual trajectories. The example of translation is discussed in relation to sociocultural approaches and how together these might inform childhood and educational studies debates. The notion of ‘method’ at work (as framework, technique or narrative) is also clarified as informed by feminist and decolonisation approaches. It is argued that ‘child as method’ offers strategies for resisting abstraction and remaining attentive to forces and relations of (re)production at issue within adult–child and child-state-development relations.

Keywords:

• Postcolonial childhood studies
• pedagogies of decolonisation
• Asia as method
• translation
• sociocultural theory

Acknowledgements

My thanks to the anonymous reviewers of earlier versions of this paper, whose comments helped to improve it enormously, plus many colleagues, to local, national and transnational encounters with whom have inspired and deepened the analyses here. In particular I should acknowledge participants at the 2016 Critical Psychology retreat in Kelsa, India; at the 2016 International Society for Cultural-Historical and Activity Research in Crete (especially Sofia Triliva and Manolis Dafermos); my other cultural-historical colleagues in Brazil (Fernando González Rey and Daniel Goulart) as well as in Norway (Agnes Andenæs, Oddbjorg Skjær Ulvik, Liv-Mette Gulbrandsen and Hanne Haavind), and finally fellow colleagues and students of Social Theories of Learning at the University of Manchester – especially Julian Williams and the Foucault reading group.

Notes

1. It lies beyond the scope of this paper to review the extensive discussions of the relations between Vygotskyan and Bourdieusian approaches. Suffice it to say here habitus can be related to zones of proximal development, while the various forms of capital (symbolic, cultural, etc.) have been juxtaposed with Vygotsky’s discussions of the development of abstract reasoning (see Williams, 2012, 2016; Williams, Davis, & Black, 2007).

2. See Bhambra (2014) for discussion of the different genealogies and geopolitical origins of these two terms.

3. Where Chen’s book is referred to I retain the italics, otherwise I am citing how others refer to the approach.

4. The various available terminologies including global North/South, minority/majority, West/Rest have strengths and limitations, while crucially they reference the economic inequalities rich/poor as well as cultural designations of ‘developed’/‘de-developed’. Corresponding with Chen’s (2010) analysis, the key point here is that there are many norths and souths within the global North and South, as the debates on methodological nationalism also highlight.

5. Space does not permit discussion of a key example of the political difficulties of the cross-cultural research (though see Burman, 2007). However it should be noted that Soviet cultural-historical group also undertook this, as indicated by their problematic Uzbekh expeditions (see Lamdan & Yasnitsky, 2016).