Let Me Hear Your Body Talk: Image-Based Research With Very Young Children

• In Event: 34.083 - The Danger of a Single Image? Methodological Explorations of Visual Research in Education

Abstract

Increasing in popularity, participatory image-based research with very young children (ages 5 and under) can still fall prey to the usual modes of conceptualizing children. Issues of ethical symmetry (Christensen & Prout, 2002) present themselves, particularly as related to differences in communication between adults and children. Though visual research is positioned as a tool that responds to ethical quandaries by “enhancing and making visible the child’s voice” (Jadue Roe, 2017, p. 342), its veiled emphasis on oral language easily lends to adult misinterpretations of young children’s photographs. In this paper, I explore what it means to ‘do participatory, image-based research’ with very young children, in light of the communicative divide between researcher and participants, paired with our tendencies to interpret children’s images through adult-inflected lenses.
The data presented in this work includes photos and interviews with three nearly 3-year-old self-identified girls from a larger qualitative study of 11 young children’s photographic practices. In an adaptation of Author’s (2010, 2016) collaborative approach, the children took photographs across their home, school, and city spaces and then engaged in individual and group interviews about their preferred images (see Table 1 for Methods). Across their interviews, Suri, Skye, and Kamea—three of the youngest participants whose corporeal capacities exceeded their verbal abilities—engaged with their own and others’ photographs most saliently through bodily gestures. Suri (age 2-10, multiracial) often uttered single phrases over and over again and threw parts of her body up against adults during the research process. Skye (age 2-11, White) held on to images for long periods of time, licking them or running the edges along her face. Kamea (age 2-11, Pacific Islander) referred to the aesthetics of her own photographs with 1-2 word utterances and gestures. These moments, recorded on video and in field notes, were confounding: What is a researcher to make of the nonverbal as a response to the visual?
From these data, I identify ways that adult researchers can work to account for children’s cultural modes in our analytic processes by considering our own ways of reading images (Rose, 2012). Through modes of inquiry inspired by Pink (2009) and Ingold (2011), I suggest researchers’ own sensual/bodily encounters with images as a way to counter the ocular- and verbocentrism of visual research, particularly for populations less likely to respond to images through traditional modes of communication. Children’s dominant modes of communication through gestures, sounds, and approximation “[lead] to the presumption of their inadequacy as describers of their own experiences” (Waksler, 1986, p. 78). Instead they should signal researchers to try out other forms of engagement with pictures. Critical childhood scholars have long urged adult researchers to minimize their ‘adultness’ (Corsaro, 2003; Mandell, 1998) in child-centered research, but this ‘adultness’ manifests not only in size and cultural practices. This paper asks us as adult researchers to maximize our perceptual senses, our ‘childness’, in order to better interpret children’s images and image-making.

Author

• Tran Templeton, University of North Texas