"I Know How to Take a Picture": Young Children's Photographic Practices and the Construction of Identity

• In Event: Promising Scholarship in Education: Dissertation Fellows and Their Research

Abstract

As a consistently marginalized group (Christensen & Prout, 2002), young children have largely been left out of narratives about them. In this work, I invited 11 children, ages 2 to 5, at a university-affiliated childcare center in New York City into the construction of their own identities vis-à-vis a digital camera. I asked these larger research questions: 1) How do young children in a preschool classroom use a camera? 2) How do they perform their identities through their photographic practices and images? 3) What multiple meanings of their identities, experiences, and childhoods are expressed in those performances across time and contexts?

Situated at the nexus of early childhood literacies, critical childhoods studies, and visual sociology, this work aims to understand how children use cameras and how they co-construct and perform their identities in/through photos in order to argue that their "photographic practices, are…worthy of study” (Tinkler, 2008, p. 264). In an adaptation of Wendy Luttrell’s (2010, 2016) Collaborative Seeing approach, the participants engaged in multiple image-making and audiencing opportunities as a way to highlight both the complexity of images and of young children’s identities. I employed ethnographic methods (including participant observations, child-directed photo-elicitation interviews, and focus groups; see Table 2) to interpret and analyze the children’s meanings, attending to images as text, narratives as a way of performing and animating those texts, and children’s multiple voices as mobilized in and through the texts (Luttrell, 2010). Analysis involved an iterative process in which images and texts were coded, and the internal and external narratives were integrated (Banks & Zeitlyn, 2015) to examine a child’s image performance in relation to other performances.

This study’s findings showcase children’s encounters with urban spaces, objects in their everyday lives, and relations with peers and adults, as told through their performances of images. Childhood identities, according to Allison James (1993), involve the continuing participation of children themselves, and at the ages of 2, 3, and 4, the participants demonstrate this ongoing work of identity construction. Through the process, the children were always in negotiation with their multiple selves and subjectivities: what to present about themselves, how to present it, to whom, and when. They made choices about what identities to claim, what to highlight, and what to hide, whether it was their status and position in the family, consumer choices, religious and ethnic practices, or gendered positions, to name a few. Their photographic performances challenged the moral panics around rapid technological advancements and the commercialization of children’s lives, suggesting that their understandings of the world far exceed adults’ expectations of them. Ultimately, the children’s photographic practices call into question the adult gaze that has been imposed onto childhoods and lend insight into the potential for participatory research with children.

Author

• Tran Templeton, University of North Texas