Take a walk: following the complexities of young children’s lives

Take a walk … 

A new journal issue presents readers with a range of possibilities. We are able to make our own comparisons, drawing together ideas and reflections across different studies, methodologies and foci brought side by side. But is this how most journal issues are now read? Editors bring together a series of articles but readers may search and find only by targeted key words, especially if our engagement with journal reading is almost all online. This is an adjustment that newspaper editors also need to face as a higher percentage of readers engage via a screen.

Articles online are not anchored in the same way, but float ‘free’, whether we are reading news or academic papers. However, a slower and more eclectic read of a journal issue may sometimes lead to surprising connections from study to study and to our own research. So this is an invitation to take a walk … 

Taken as a whole, the articles in this issue are indicative of the geographical and methodological breadth of research currently being undertaken across Europe and beyond, concerning young children’s lives. The texts travel from rural China (Fleer and Li) and urban Russia (Bayanova and Mustafin), to Turkey (Kotaman), Cyprus (Tsangaridou and Genethliou), Finland (Iivonen, Sääkslahti, Mehtälä, Villberg, Soini and Poskiparta), to a Korean child in French-speaking Canada (Kim).

International perspectives are further developed through cross-national conceptual, empirical and policy-driven collaborations. Huser, Dockett and Perry’s conceptual article brings together German and Australian academics’ shared understandings of the metaphor of ‘bridges’ in transitions. Hammer and He’s empirical article is based on a comparative study of science teaching in kindergartens in Norway and China. Moving to the policy level, Nyland and Ng explore recent curriculum changes in Singapore and Australia.

Such assemblage of ideas is one of the strengths of this journal and the community of early childhood researchers involved in EECERA activities, this dynamic process of research and exchange. This issue also enables comparison by subject matter, featuring two articles on the under-researched area of the relationship between young children’s physical activity and motor-skills in Finland (Iivonen et al.) and in Norway (Sigmundsson and Haga).

Holding the complexities

In my own reading of the account of the trilingual child, Julie, in Kim’s article, resonates with my own interests in children’s ‘voices’ and participation in both research and learning as well as adding depth to my reflections on other articles here. This case study of Julie is taken from a qualitative longitudinal study of Julie between the ages of six and eight as she navigates between informal and formal learning contexts using a range of multi-literacies, including drawing.

This account raises questions about the continued mismatch between some formal learning contexts and children’s competencies. It is a reminder of the continued importance of listening to young children’s perspectives in research and practice, regardless of whether policy interest in this area in individual countries waxes or wanes. The increasing pressure of testing children at a younger and younger age in early childhood education squeezes the limited time available for learning the unexpected from children (and parents). The detailed account of the competencies of this trilingual child and the multi-literacies Kim demonstrates challenges the way children’s lives are framed and contained. It would be interesting to use this case study as a catalyst for discussion with the early childhood teachers represented in Kotaman’s study. A sense of helplessness is conveyed by some of the newly qualified Turkish teachers in Kotaman’s study regarding language barriers with parents and children. Julie’s case study does not provide easy answers but highlights perspectives from the other side of such barriers that formal learning environments often erect.

This leads to the question for researchers of which young children’s voices are underrepresented or missing from global narratives about early childhood? It is, for example, a challenge for this journal and other early years publications to see the complexities of young children’s lives in urban and rural communities across Africa taken up more widely. This also applies to creating more openings for African academics who are carrying out research in these areas. It would be encouraging to see more creative cross-national collaborations on young children’s perspectives involving such voices. It is a reminder to ask ‘whose voices count?’ and an indication of the political and ethical dimensions to publication beyond research assessment exercises in the Minority World.

Julie’s trilingualism and multi-literacies are a further indication of the need for researchers working with young children’s perspectives to widen the multimodal tools given validity within qualitative research. This mirrors current changes in the modes of communication between young children and adults both digital and analogue. It is an indication of how work on young children’s participation is not a static field but continues to change and be changed. How for example do young children adapt to communicating with distant parents and grandparents via virtual spaces such as Skype? What sense do children make of this disembodied process? How can both adults and children be supported in strengthening communication in this way?

Creative representations

Widening the range of literacies brought into the research arena with young children should push the boundaries of how research is communicated. The burgeoning of early childhood research incorporating children’s photographs, for example, has had a surprisingly limited impact on how such research is communicated, bound by the constraints of publishers with restricted use of visuals and limited use of colour. This is in contrast to some innovative developments in children’s fiction. Faced with changes in how children, as well as adult readers, engage with text some children’s authors and illustrators have played with the construction of a book from within. The Marvels by Brian Selznick, for example is a tale of shipwreck, theatre and refuge. The first 400 of the 650 pages are composed solely of tightly drawn illustrations in pencil. The book blurs the boundary between graphic novel and more traditional fiction. Perhaps in early childhood research more partnerships are needed to represent visual research narratives in more innovative ways and to give more academic weight to multisensory explorations of children’s lives. Artists and filmmakers offer wide possibilities here. The Face2Face project, part of the longitudinal Making Motherhoods study is one such example. Working with a filmmaker on this methodological innovation project micro-ethnographies of children’s lives have been constructed as interactive multimedia representations combining sounds, videos and photographs (see http://modernmothers.org.)

The integration of sound brings an added dimension to these online portraits and is a reminder of the potential of ethnographic methods guided by understandings of the senses (for example Pink 2009).

Translatable research methodologies and methods

Creating opportunities for the co-construction of knowledge about everyday childhoods is at the heart of researching children’s perspectives within a sociocultural frame. There continue to be opportunities for researchers to form new partnerships to explore such meaning-making with young children and professionals beyond early childhood education. Two recent examples in my own work have been discussion with art therapists and with performance artists. Both centre their own practice on finely tuned work with children whilst searching for ways in which to explore children’s perspectives of their practice. Initial discussions with art therapists have revealed some of the potential challenges of reviewing sensitive sessions with young children over time, in a particular spatial context and professional relationships. This raises ethical issues that early childhood researchers have been engaged in over the past decade (for example, Harcourt, Perry, and Waller 2011). This research experience with young children enables us to collaborate with other professionals to help pose questions rather than provide neat answers.

Theatre for young audiences has provided the second context for such explorations of children’s meaning-making (Clark 2015). I have gained a deep respect for the ongoing observation and adaptation that can take place as theatre professionals engage with young children. It has proved to be another arena where discussions about multi-literacies and digital technology overlap with questions of the child’s ‘voice’.

I hope that, however you engage with the articles in this issue, whether by a slow walk or a quick ‘fish’ by keywords you find contexts, foci, methodologies and childhoods that add new rhizomes to your networks of knowledge and provide further avenues for engaging with early childhood research.