Riikka Hohti

Lollipop stories: Listening to children’s voices in the classroom and narrative ethnographical research

This article offers a methodological contribution to the concept of children’s voices and the ways of listening to them. Children’s voices are studied in a narrative ethnographical research project in a school classroom. The authors follow children’s voices from the level of classroom observation to an analysis on narrative data produced by the Storycrafting method and finally to a more reflexive analysis. By defining three interrelated analytical spaces, the study illustrates how voices are emergent, contingent on their social, discursive and physical environments and power relations, and constructed in reciprocal processes of telling and listening. Finally, the authors discuss the significance of reflexive listening to children’s voices.

Children writing ethnography: children's perspectives and nomadic thinking in researching school classrooms

This article makes a connection between narrative ethnography, childhood studies and new materialist theories in studying childrens perspective on school. It presents ‘children writing ethnography’ as an approach based on complexity and involving participatory research. The question of ‘what is happening in the classroom’ is explored through writings produced in class by 10-year olds. The ‘messy’ ethnographic data are examined within the framework of narrative ethnography using the idea of ‘small stories’ that capture everyday interaction. Furthermore, both material and embodied meanings in the writings are discussed. New materialist theories and the idea of nomadic make it possible to account for the connectivity between the writings, the classroom reality, the child-ethnographers and the research, which are seen as mutually producing one another. The author suggests that engaging with childrens free-flowing ethnographic writing serves as a productive way to conduct participatory ethnographic research, as well as to investigate contemporary childhoods in all their complexity.

Reconfiguring urban environmental education with ‘shitgull’ and a ‘shop’

Abstract The worry over urban children having lost their connection to nature is most often addressed with either initiatives of reinserting the ‘child back to nature’ or with evidence aiming to prove that the worry is unfounded to begin with. Neither approach furthers our understanding of child–nature relations as continuing transformation of both ‘child’ (‘human’) and ‘nature’. The objective of this paper is to redirect attention from evaluating connectedness of two separate units to mapping mutual emergence of children and their surroundings in relation to each other. The question asked is: Of what kind is environmental education beyond connectedness of ‘child’ and ‘nature’? The aligned theoretical approach, (critical) posthumanism, will help us to elaborate a premise for environmental education according to which humans and their nonhuman surroundings do not exist as independent of each other. The empirically grounded events discussed in this paper are named ‘shitgulls’ and ‘shops’. These events map mutual emergence of child and nature, evidencing the need for environmental education to understand itself as a relational phenomenon.

Time, things, teacher, pupil: engaging with what matters

Abstract This article presents an empirical study of everyday life in school and a methodological attempt to emphasise children’s views and to find ways other than representation to analyse them. The empirical portion took place in a Finnish elementary school in which the author was the class teacher. The ten-year-olds in the class engaged in an unstructured classroom diary activity in which they freely wrote their observations, thoughts and stories. The study takes a relational materialist approach to the children’s writings focusing on various moments and gatherings in the classroom as assemblages and illustrates how time, things, teacher and pupils are co-produced in them. Temporality and materiality are also considered in relation to research methodologies. Research with children is reconceptualised based on the focus on mattering. The analysis is enacted as a non-linear and nomadic process through retelling and responding to the children’s texts. It highlights particular situations, unstabilities, ‘tiny’ things and the complexities of children’s lives in educational environments.