Picture This! Examining How Pre-K Children Mobilize Making and Movement to See Speculative Futures With Photography

• In Event: 47.068 - Picturing Inquiry, Framing Childhood: Examining Drawing, Photos, and Photography in Critical Early Childhood Research

Abstract

Purpose
This paper tackles Szarkowski’s (1966) text to examine how children’s photography, when examined through a posthumanist perspective, expands the sentient possibilities of ‘seeing’ in early childhood research. More specifically, it zeroes in on three of Szarkowski’s (1966) focal elements (vantage point, the thing itself, the detail) to look at child-produced photography as a relational assemblage, an entanglement of space, place, body, and experience.

Theoretical Perspectives & Focus of Inquiry
Thinking through the twin lens of posthumanist perspectives on early childhood (Lenz-Taguchi, 2010; Murris, 2016) and arts-based inquiry (Barone & Eisner, 2012), this paper examines photography as a relational process between children and the more-than-human world. Taking photography as a relational assemblage, it asks the following questions:
· How do 11 Pre-K3 students represent their engagement with ‘making’ and movement through digital photography?
· How, when refracted through digital photography, do Pre-K3 students make sense of/in/with photos and digital photography?
· What new perspectives/concepts does this examination of PreK3 children engaging in digital photography provide early childhood educators? How does it allows us to ‘see’ differently?

Techniques and Modes of Inquiry
Drawing on a larger empirical study examining diverse sites of early childhood making, this paper uses arts-based methods (Barone & Eisner, 2012) and visual analysis (Rose, 2012) to study the photographs 11 Pre-K3 children produced in documenting their ‘making’ process. While data from the larger study included videotaped observations of children engaged in project-based ‘making’ and adult-produced artifacts (i.e., photos of children making), sources of data for this paper are child-produced photographs (n=297).
In analyzing data, photos were first aggregated by individual child and later examined as a larger corpus. Researchers then created an analytic matrix. The matrix provided an additional channel to examine the unfolding of concepts such as movement, emergence, and action.

Findings
Findings in this paper are broken into episodic stories. Each turns around the central proposition that children’s photography is an entangled field of material relations and ontological events. By allowing children to showcase what their ‘making’ of speculative futures entailed, the possibilities of what students communicated expanded. Additionally, unbound by language, photography provided students greater freedom to name a wide variety of human (e.g., the researcher) and more-than-human things (e.g., atmospheres of play and movement) as texts. Findings capture children’s complicated ways of being, seeing, and making in the world.

Significance
Children’s digital photography, as this paper suggests, is an ontological event. A sense of place and process is not represented by but produced with children. Thus, this paper’s significance lies in embracing digital photography as a democratizing enterprise, one that sees photographic elements (e.g., vantage point and detail) not solely as objects but as relations. Child-produced photography elicit methodological moments of impact as materials produce memories, emotions, and desires in their encounters with children.

Author

• Jon Michael Wargo, Boston College