Researching Young Children's Perspectives


Book Description

This book is designed to help students face the ethical, methodological and theoretical challenges and complexities involved in engaging children in rights-based, participatory research.




Researching Children's Perspectives


Book Description

"This is a book which I will return to over time. It carries a powerful, and empowering, message about the task of researching children's views...(It) deserves to find an automatic place in staffroom libraries. I happily recommed it." - Support for Learning" The 1990s have been marked by a growing emphasis, in various professional contexts, on obtaining the views of clients, including children. This position is an international one, shared across the developed world, and encapsulated in the UN Convention on the rights of the child. This book addresses the issues and practicalities surrounding the obtaining of children's views, particularly in the research context. The book takes a deliberately and explicitly pluralist stance. Its distinctiveness rests on the scrutiny of methodological issues pertaining to the collection of children's views and practical applications. The book is structured around two main sections. Section 1 examines five aspects of theoretical and conceptual issues (ethical issues and codes of conduct, children's rights, the legal perspective, developmental dimensions and sociological issues). Section 2 illustrates these aspects by focusing on methods and applications in obtaining children's views in specific projects. The book is aimed at researchers and graduate students in psychology, social sciences, education, health and law. It will also be of value to a range of professionals involved in eliciting children's views (e.g. psychologists, teachers, social workers, medical workers and the police).




Inside Role-Play in Early Childhood Education


Book Description

Based on extensive research, and grounded in everyday classroom practice, the authors of this book explore important issues surrounding play in the early years curriculum. The book presents children’s views on, and response to their role-play environment, alongside examples of good classroom practice, and addresses vital questions such as: Will structuring role play replace children’s own attempts to create scenarios that grow out of their interests and relationships? Has an over-emphasis on subjects like literacy and numeracy eclipsed the important processes inherent in children’s social play? How we can ensure that provision for role play fully benefits all young children? Critically, the authors present the child’s perspective on play in schools throughout, and argue firmly against a formal, inflexible learning environment for young children. This book will be fascinating to all students on primary education undergraduate courses and early childhood studies. Researchers and course leaders will also find this book a ground-breaking read.




Research With Children


Book Description

Research with Children is a unique resource book on the methodology of childhood research. Leading and new researchers within the social studies of childhood discuss central questions of epistemology and methodology, demonstrating the links between theory and practice. The theoretical and practical questions are set out in a clear and well-argued fashion and will therefore appeal both to the newcomer to childhood studies and to experienced researchers in the field.




Contemporary Perspectives on Research in Creativity in Early Childhood Education


Book Description

Recently, a new understanding of creative thought and creative performance has surfaced. It has also attracted the attention of early childhood professional organizations and researchers. Professional organizations have included it in their publications and conferences. While current creativity researchers have initiated a far more sophisticated understanding of young children’s creative thinking, ways to assess creativity, strategies to promote creativity, and research methodologies. The purpose of this volume is to present a wide range of different theories and areas in the study of creativity to help researchers and theorists work toward the development of different perspectives on creativity with young children. It focuses on critical analyses and reviews of the literature on topics related to creativity research, development, theories, and practices. It will serve as a reference for early childhood education researchers, scholars, academics, general educators, teacher educators, teachers, graduate students, and scientists to stimulate further “dialogue” on ways to enhance creativity. The chapters are of high quality and provide scholarly analyses of research studies that capture the full range of approaches to the study of creativity --- behavioral, clinical, cognitive, cross-cultural, developmental, educational, genetic, organizational, psychoanalytic, psychometric, and social. Interdisciplinary research is also included, as is research within specific domains such as art and science, as well as on critical issues (e.g., aesthetics, genius, imagery, imagination, insight, intuition, metaphor, play, problem finding and solving). Thus, it offers critical analyses on reviews of research in a form that are useful to early childhood researchers, scholars, educators, and graduate students. It also places the current research in its historical context. The volume is also of interest to the general readers who are interested in the young children’s creativity. The chapters are authored by established scholars in the field of young children’s creativity.




Beyond Listening


Book Description

More young children than ever before are spending their time in some form of early childhood service. But how do we know what they think about it? While there has been a move to take children's views into account more generally, very little attention has been given to listening to young children below the age of six or seven.This book is the first of its kind to focus on listening to young children, both from an international perspective and through combining theory, practice and reflection. With contributions and examples from researchers and practitioners in six countries it examines critically how listening to young children in early childhood services is understood and practised.Each chapter is rooted in the everyday lives of young children and presents a range of actual experiences for students and practitioners to draw from. Beyond listening goes further to address key questions emerging from early childhood services and research. These are What do we mean by listening? Why listen? How do we listen to young children? What view of the child do different approaches to listening presume? What risks does listening entail for young children?The authors are leading experts in this area of rapidly growing interest and have themselves developed innovative methods such as the Mosaic approach, which is discussed in the book.




Researching Children′s Experience


Book Description

`Strongly recommended as it provides a very useful overview of a range of methods, mainly textual, for exploring children′s experiences. These accounts are placed well in the broader conceptual frameworks concerning both methodologies and ethical considerations′ - Educational Review How should the researcher approach the sensitive subject of the child? What are the ethical issues involved in researching children′s experiences? In essays written by a collection of key, international authors, Researching Children′s Experience addresses these questions, and examines up-to-date methodological and conceptual approaches to researching children. This book is a practical, comprehensive and interdisciplinary guide for advanced students and researchers, exploring a range of studies, and the theoretical and ethical motivations behind them. The book is divided into three coherent sections: - Conceptual, methodological and ethical issues in researching children′s experiences. - Methods for conducting research with children. - The generation and analysis of text. Researching Children′s Experience provides examples of how researchers from a variety of social science perspectives have set about carrying out research into children′s experience. Useful to students embarking on a research project, and to experienced researchers wishing to explore new methods, Greene and Hogan′s book is an essential addition to anyone doing research on children. It will be especially useful to those in developmental psychology, education, nursing and other disciplines interested in studying children′s experience.




Child Perspectives and Children’s Perspectives in Theory and Practice


Book Description

Recent decades have seen a growing emphasis, in a number of professional contexts, on acknowledging and acting on the views of children. This trend was given added weight by the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, ratified in 1990. Today, seeking the perspective of the child has become an essential process in all sorts of tasks, from framing new legislation to regulating professions. This book answers the fundamental question of what it is that constitutes a ‘child perspective’, and how this might differ from the perspectives of children themselves. The answers to such questions have important implications for building progressive and developmental adult-child relationships. However, theoretical and empirical treatments of child perspectives and children’s perspectives are very diverse and idiosyncratic, and the standard reference work has yet to be written. Thus, this work is an attempt to fill the gap in the literature by searching for and defining key formulations of potential child perspectives within parts of the so-called ‘new child paradigm’. This has been derived from childhood sociology, contextual-relational developmental psychology, interpretative humanistic psychology and developmental pedagogy. The highly experienced authors develop a comprehensive professional child perspective paradigm that integrates recent theory and empirical child research. With its clear presentation of underlying theories and suggested applications, this book illustrates a child-oriented understanding of specific relevance to both child-care and preschool educational practice.




Ethics and Research with Young Children


Book Description

As researchers and theorists, teachers and teacher educators, parents and grandparents and advocates for children, the authors featured in Ethics and Research with Young Children share a common inclination to counter the idea of an ethics that is conventional-i.e., an ethics that reinforces existing models and discourses, which position children as irrational and incompetent; that de-anonymize children's ways of working and being in the world; that reduces and distorts the social, cultural and political forces that shape children's everyday realities; and, that routinely subtracts from these realities the complex responsibilities that adults have (especially as researchers) to recognize ethics as situated, relational, intersectional, and provisional. Aligned with the interdisciplinary commitments of a Childhood Studies approach and informed by a range of theoretical and practical frameworks, the perspectives offered in this volume are grounded in relationships between and among adults and children, their shifting social, cultural, political and material realities, and a world of ideas and experiences that impel them to face and reorient their ethical commitments to each other.




Transforming the Workforce for Children Birth Through Age 8


Book Description

Children are already learning at birth, and they develop and learn at a rapid pace in their early years. This provides a critical foundation for lifelong progress, and the adults who provide for the care and the education of young children bear a great responsibility for their health, development, and learning. Despite the fact that they share the same objective - to nurture young children and secure their future success - the various practitioners who contribute to the care and the education of children from birth through age 8 are not acknowledged as a workforce unified by the common knowledge and competencies needed to do their jobs well. Transforming the Workforce for Children Birth Through Age 8 explores the science of child development, particularly looking at implications for the professionals who work with children. This report examines the current capacities and practices of the workforce, the settings in which they work, the policies and infrastructure that set qualifications and provide professional learning, and the government agencies and other funders who support and oversee these systems. This book then makes recommendations to improve the quality of professional practice and the practice environment for care and education professionals. These detailed recommendations create a blueprint for action that builds on a unifying foundation of child development and early learning, shared knowledge and competencies for care and education professionals, and principles for effective professional learning. Young children thrive and learn best when they have secure, positive relationships with adults who are knowledgeable about how to support their development and learning and are responsive to their individual progress. Transforming the Workforce for Children Birth Through Age 8 offers guidance on system changes to improve the quality of professional practice, specific actions to improve professional learning systems and workforce development, and research to continue to build the knowledge base in ways that will directly advance and inform future actions. The recommendations of this book provide an opportunity to improve the quality of the care and the education that children receive, and ultimately improve outcomes for children.