Becky Parry

Arts-Based Approaches to Research with Children: Living with Mess

After the emergence of a distinct sociology of childhood, methodological approaches to research with children have been particularly concerned to work ethically and meaningfully with them. In this volume, Elizabeth Wood (Chapter 9) takes us beyond this consideration of ethics, challenging some of the rhetoric about the use of visual media to empower children within a research process. It is important to avoid positioning new technologies, in particular, as a panacea, which enables researchers to get inside children’s minds. However, concerns about the limitations of an overuse of the written and spoken word in research, alongside rapid technological innovation, have precipitated an increased use of visual methods. It is therefore appropriate to reflect on the impact of this change. In this chapter I focus on arts-based methods in research with children and young people, influenced by the notion, perhaps best described by Loris Malaguzzi (1987), that children have 100 languages with which they express their emerging thoughts and ideas and that each form makes different expressions, ideas and articulations possible.

Reading and rereading ‘Shrek’

Abstract This article presents the findings of a small‐scale research project which aimed to enable young people to reflect on their childhood responses to the popular films, ‘Shrek’ and ‘Shrek 2’. During the project the participants develop new readings of the films in the light of their own recent experiences both of life and of other texts. The research draws on reader response theories to describe the complex readings of the films made by two young women from Rotherham. These readings include an engagement with an element of the films’ narrative structure, the relationship dilemma between the main characters. There was also clearly recollection of enjoyment of the animation style, the humour and the fairytale intertextuality of the film. However, the strongest response was based on more recent experiences and involved considerable empathy with the characters. This has important implications for both educational research and classroom practice. This paper argues for an increased recognition of the significance of children and young people’s engagements with popular children’s films as integral to their development as readers and creators of narrative texts.

Researching Film with Children

When devising an approach to my fieldwork, my main concern was to work ethically and meaningfully with children to explore the questions outlined in my literature review. Hart (1992) observes that in research, children are commonly subjects of formal, language-orientated methods: Unfortunately most social science research with children is still of the distant adult controlled type: questionnaires and structured interviews which barely scrape the surface of what children are able to tell. (Hart, 1992, p. 14) Such research is met, by some children, with a resounding ‘culture of silence’ (Reason, 1994, p. 328). Gauntlett (2005) argues that relying solely on formal methods of data collection, based on analysis of spoken and written language, can restrict participation. Furthermore, research which enables children with particular verbal and written language skills to dominate can obscure the experiences of others. In the emerging literature about participatory approaches to research with children there are many calls for diverse, flexible and culturally appropriate methods which overcome the ‘I don’t know syndrome’, which acts as a barrier to research (Malone, 1999, p. 18). Furthermore, as Hart argues: One must identify situations which will maximise a child’s opportunities to demonstrate her competence.

Assets, Resources and Repertoires

We use narratives to formulate our identities and to share our culture. When we learn to read we do not only learn how to decode alphabetic text, we also learn stories and storytelling. Narrative, therefore, is a cultural aspect of literacy. Narratives are not only experienced through language, they are ubiquitous in other forms such as film, television, games, photographs, comics and music. Each of these forms of narrative incorporate common narrative characteristics such as characters, plot and settings, but they all also tell stories in distinct ways. Bordwell and Thompson (2003) define narrative in films as the cause and effect relationship between events so that a random selection of events could not be described as a narrative. They also define ‘categorical films’, ‘rhetorical films’ and ‘abstract films’ as films that do not present a series of events that have a cause and effect relationship and therefore cannot be described as narrative films. Chatman (1990) similarly distinguishes three text types as ‘narrative’, ‘argumentation’ and ‘description’, which again emphasises the potentially quite contrasting nature of a narrative film, an advert or a film montage.

A Case for Children’s Film

The nature of this study was a small scale, qualitative research project which drew on the experiences of six children in one school, in a large city in the UK. It was never my intention to produce research which attempted to generalise about the particular experiences of these children to make inferences about the wider population. As Cohen, Manion and Morrison (2007) point out, this would amount to attempting to apply the measures of reliability of quantitative work to qualitative work. I aim to avoid drawing on the rhetoric (Firestone, 1987) of quantitative methodologies, particularly in relation to the making of generalisations. Regardless of scale or paradigm, or claims to be ‘evidence-based’, as we hear in everyday discussions of education, research can only present data which are particular to the researchers, the context and the research participants at a particular time and context (Wellington, 2000). The limitations and criticisms of qualitative work are often the result of inappropriately applying quantitative criteria. To evaluate qualitative work thoughtfully and rigorously, the tools of appraisal should stem from the qualitative paradigm: Qualitative methods express the assumptions of a phenomenological paradigm that there are multiple realities that are socially defined. (Firestone, 1987, p. 16)

Movies Teach Movies

Spencer (1998) argues that children learn to read texts from the texts they read. Hilton (1996) develops this argument in relation to media texts, proposing that media ‘texts themselves could thus “teach” the learner to unlock further ones’ (Hilton, 1996, p. 8). Robinson’s (1997) notion of a repertoire of narrative experiences extends this idea further, recognising that children’s understandings of narrative are drawn from all their experiences including oral, print, film and media sources (Robinson, 1997, p. 178). Protherough (1983) argues in relation to books that, ‘Reading abilities and habits are formed primarily through encounters with fiction’, (Protherough, 1983, p. 174). Children also learn about how to read and enjoy films by watching and engaging with them. The complex and sophisticated meta-language of film is regularly made sense of and enjoyed by children, who develop implicit knowledge of the way films are constructed; movies teach movies. This has become the central argument of this research, opening up questions about what and how children learn about narrative through their engagements with children’s films. To address this question, it is first critical to consider the different processes involved in reading film and print narratives.

Introduction: A Narrative on Narrative

Narrative is ubiquitous and takes many forms, from written and oral language to still and moving images. Barthes (1975) observes that in every culture narrative is ever present: Like life itself, it is there, international, transhistorical, transcultural. (Barthes, 1975, p. 1) As Barthes describes, the earliest philosophers, including Aristotle, turned their attention to defining the characteristics of narratives and this has been the subject of debate as new forms of storytelling emerge. Regardless of innovations in medium and form, narratives continue to be highly important to the lives of children: When we are born we enter into a world of stories: the stories of our parents, our generation, our culture, our nation, our civilisation. (Goodson, et al., 2010, p. 2) As parents we teach children how to be, how to think, how to imagine, how to feel, how to remember, using stories in many different forms. Bruner (1986) describes narrative as a mode of thought and the work of Vygotsky (1978) and Elkonin (1978) demonstrates that it is make-believe or playing stories which form the richest context for young children’s learning. Hardy (1975) describes narrative as a primary act of mind: Narrative is crucial in life and in literature.

Film Identities in Practice

In the early stages of my fieldwork, I arrived at my research school at playtime, to meet the class teacher. I walked past the nursery children out in the playground. ‘You’re Darth Sidius! You’re Darth Sidius!’ said one boy to another who was lying on the ground with his arms raised into a triangle, holding his imaginary light sabre in an accurate re-enactment of a Jedi warrior character in Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones,, (Lucas, 2002). I made a mental note to add this to my research journal at the time, and this moment has since increased in significance because of the many times I encountered similar play. These children were four-years-old, the film upon which their play was based was shown in cinemas two years before their birth. This playful engagement demonstrates that film is far from ephemeral (Robinson, 1997) but is a source of narrative, providing symbolic resources (Buckingham and Sefton-Green, 1994), in this case an iconic gesture, for play as well as identity negotiation (Marsh, 2005).

Children’s Film: Children’s Cultures

Children’s films are currently hugely successful commercially and well received critically; many, many films for children are made each year (although less so in the UK). In the past families watched the first broadcast of films at Christmas such as The Wizard of Oz, (Fleming, 1939). According to research published by the now-abolished UK Film Council (UKFC), of the most successful films worldwide between 2001 and 2008 the top twenty were made for families and accessed by children (UKFC, 2009a), for example the Harry Potter, (Columbus, 2002) Lord of the Rings, (Jackson, 2001), Star Wars, (Lucas, 2002) Spiderman, (Raimi, 2002) and Shrek, (Adamson and Jenson, 2001) series of films. Furthermore, children and young people and their parents make up the largest audiences for cinema in the UK: The cinema audience for the top 20 films in 2008 was predominantly young, with the 7–34 age group (40% of the population) making up 64% of the audience. (UKFC, 2008, p. 116) Children today access many more and a much wider range of films at the cinema, on television, on video, DVD, and on the Internet. Viewing can be a solitary or shared experience and children can watch again, pause, rewind and fast-forward to favourite moments and watch the ‘making of’ content. Related toys, clothes, bedding and books can extend their experience of film narratives (Marsh, 2005).

Film in Children’s Film Production

Children are resourceful in their attempts to draw on their repertoires of narrative in their storytelling but very often in school this storytelling process is constrained in particular ways by the strong emphasis on writing. Furthermore, current practices relating to the teaching of writing in schools such as direct modelling (Barrs, 2001) can further limit the extent to which children fully express their ideas and understandings, particularly in relation to popular culture (Willett, 2001; Parry, 2010). As Willett (2005b) concludes, looking for children’s uses of popular culture in children’s writing provides only a partial picture of their narrative repertoires, so it is critical to also look at their production of multimodal narrative texts.