Exploring young children’s everyday lives

This two-day event, organised by the Toys and Technology research team at the School of Education at the University of Stirling drew on the team’s ESRC-funded project Young Children Learning with Toys and Technology at Home (2008-2011). It brought together researchers exploring the everyday lives and learning of children under five years.

Pia Christensen set the theme of the event with a keynote presentation: ‘Ethnographic lessons from studies of young children’s lives’. Coming from an anthropological perspective, she explored some of the issues around doing ethnographic research with young children. Christensen beautifully described the research process itself as a form of communication and dialogue in which we try to find sensitive and appropriate ways to listen to and understand what our research participants are saying. Finding ways to include participants’ voices in our research with young children for whom verbal conversation is not their primary means of communication is a central concern for many early childhood researchers. Tapping into children’s existing cultures of communication – through gesture, play, song, drawing, photography – is therefore at the heart of research with young children as we try to understand their experience, understandings and meaning-making from their points of view.

The theme of children’s voices returned throughout the event, allowing different researchers to explore this theme from different angles and even question whether “Children’s Voice” was now a ‘new orthodoxy’ that could sometimes be applied unreflectively without considering how we act on what we learn from listening to children.

Doctoral students presented their work and a substantial period of time was dedicated to feedback from a panel formed of Alan Prout, Pia Christensen and Lydia Plowman and questions from the audience. As well as giving students some experience of and opportunities for viva preparation, this format also provided a chance for reflection and extended discussion of some very interesting work – an opportunity that the usual five-minute Q&A sessions in conferences rarely afford.

It was exciting to see work in progress and the enthusiasm and insight of the doctoral students presenting their work who dealt with diverse topics including:

• Multi-sensory methodologies in researching nature’s kindergartens
• Four year olds' spatial drawings
• Bilingual Gaelic and English speaking children’s social use of language
• The meanings and use of objects children bring to nursery settings

Alan Prout’s closing comments on the first day crystallised some of the recurring tensions and complexities of doing research with young children and the researching ‘everyday life’.

Studying children and childhood is not a completely different process from studying adults: children share in the language, cultures and technologies that we all use. Prout went on to say that we do not need different methods or theoretical approaches that we would use with adults because we are studying children. Rather, we need to adapt our methods in light of our participants’ abilities to engage with them, so verbal, physical or literacy skills might demand different methods, but ‘children’ and ‘childhood’ don’t form a completely separate category of enquiry.

Researching the nature of ‘everyday life’ requires us to make decisions about which aspects to attend to; it is not possible to encompass all of ‘life’ in our research. In doing so, we step into the natural flow of everyday life and freeze particular moments and aspects in order to analyse them. By foregrounding some aspects and backgrounding others, by making choices about what is important and what is not, we necessarily change the nature of the natural ebb and flow of everyday life.