Rosie Flewitt

Conducting Research with Young Children: Some Ethical Considerations.

The recent foundation of a ‘Young Childrens Perspectives’ special interest group in the European Early Childhood Education Research Association (EECERA) reflects a general move in social research towards the respectful and inclusive involvement of children in the research process. However, established education research guidelines often provide no more than a loose ethical framework, appearing to focus on avoiding poor ethical conduct rather than proposing ways forward for making childrens participation in research a positive experience. This short paper draws on my own experiences of conducting ESRC‐funded ethnographic video case studies on the ways four three‐year‐old children express their understandings at home and in a preschool playgroup during their first year of early years education. The paper reflects on the processes of negotiating initial and ongoing consent, problematises the notion of ‘informed’ consent in exploratory research with young children, and considers questions of anonymity when collecting and reporting on visual data. The paper proposes that by adopting a flexible, reflective stance, early years researchers can learn much from children, not only about their perspectives, but also about how to include young children in the research process.

Using video to investigate preschool classroom interaction: education research assumptions and methodological practices

This article reports on the use of video to collect dynamic visual data in education research and proposes that using visual technologies to collect data can give new insights into classroom interaction. Video data unveil how young children use the full range of material and bodily resources available to them to make and express meaning, forcing a reconsideration of Vygotskian accounts of the relationship between thought and language by producing grounded evidence for a pluralistic interpretation of the construction and negotiation of meaning. In addition to challenging language-biased approaches to classroom interaction, using video to collect data also forces a reexamination of established methodological practices. Drawing on data from ESRC-funded ethnographic video case studies of 3-year-old children communicating at home and in a preschool playgroup, this article discusses methodological and ethical dilemmas encountered in the collection and transcription, or representation, of dynamic visual data, arguing that visual data gives insights into aspects of communicative behaviour previously unaccounted for in early years education research.

New directions for early literacy in a digital age: the iPad

In this paper, we discuss how iPads offer innovative opportunities for early literacy learning but also present challenges for teachers and children. We lent iPads to a Children’s Centre nursery (3- to 4-year-olds), a primary school reception class (4- to 5-year-olds) and a Special School (7- to 13-year-olds), discussed their potential uses with staff in pre- and post-interviews and observed how they were integrated into practice over a two-month period. We found variability in the ways iPads were used across the settings, but a commonality was that well-planned; iPad-based literacy activities stimulated children’s motivation and concentration. They also offered rich opportunities for communication, collaborative interaction, independent learning, and for children to achieve high levels of accomplishment. In some cases, this led teachers favourably to re-evaluate the children’s literacy competence, and enabled children to construct positive images of themselves in the literacy classroom. Practitioners particularly valued the opportunities iPads afforded to deliver curriculum guidelines in new ways, and to familiarise all students with touch-screen technologies.

New technologies, new multimodal literacy practices and young children's metacognitive development

This paper discusses concepts of learning through ‘collaborative multimodal dialogue’. It draws on an ESRC‐funded study (RES‐000‐22‐2451) investigating 3‐ and 4‐year‐old childrens encounters with literacy as they engage with a range of printed and digital technologies at home and in a nursery. The study goes beyond analysis of spoken language, giving a more complete understanding of literacy learning processes through detailed analysis of how children use multiple communicative modes as they experience literacy in different media. These experiences underpin metacognitive development and are crucial to childrens abilities to act strategically in future situations. Drawing on notions of literacy as social practice, this paper discusses how the advent of new technologies has introduced new dimensions into young childrens literacy learning, the implications of which have not yet been fully recognised in early years policy guidance, training or practice.

Bringing ethnography to a multimodal investigation of early literacy in a digital age

In this article I reflect on the insights that the well established traditions of ethnography can bring to the more recent analytic tools of multimodality in the investigation of early literacy practices. First, I consider the intersection between ethnography and multimodality, their compatibility and the tensions and ambivalences that arise from their potentially conflicting epistemological framings. Drawing on ESRC-funded case studies of three and four-year-old children’s experiences of literacy with printed and digital media,1 I then illustrate how an ethnographic toolkit that incorporates a social semiotic approach to multimodality can produce richly situated insights into the complexities of early literacy development in a digital age, and can inform socially and culturally sensitive theories of literacy as social practice (Street, 1984, 2008).

Is every child's voice heard? Researching the different ways 3‐year‐old children communicate and make meaning at home and in a pre‐school playgroup

This ESRC‐funded study explores how 3‐year‐old children use a range of ‘voices’ during their first year in pre‐school, investigating how they make and express meaning ‘multimodally’ through combinations of talk, body movement, facial expression and gaze in the two different settings of home and playgroup. Using longitudinal ethnographic video case studies of four children, two boys and two girls, the study identifies patterns in the childrens uses of different communicative strategies that relate to the dynamics of the institutional and immediate contexts in which they are situated. The findings imply that the current focus on talk in the early years may be detracting from the diversity of ways children make and express meaning.

Multimodality and ethnography: working at the intersection

This special issue of Qualitative Research was produced in the context of a comparatively recent surge in qualitative ‘multimodal’ research. A number of scholars from diverse disciplinary and theoretical traditions have turned to multimodality in their endeavours to understand everyday communication and interaction in contemporary social life, often foregrounding certain tensions with more established research traditions, such as ethnography. In this issue, we focus on the methodological and theoretical implications of bringing multimodality and ethnography into dialogue with each other – a development that, we think, throws up some provocative issues for qualitative research methodology. These include questions about the ‘epistemological compatibility’ of different approaches, when each carries particular theoretical and methodological histories and associations, and what might be gained and lost in endeavours to bring together their respective descriptive and analytic conventions.

Understanding research with children and young people

What do children understand about their worlds? Why do young people behave in certain ways? Research is the key to answering these and many other questions you may have in the course of your work or study. As an introduction to research, this book helps you understand how research is designed and carried out, as well as the particular practical and ethical issues involved in researching with children and young people. A key feature of the book is the examples of “real research” which have been selected to show... • Different methods of collecting data in action • Challenges that arise at various stages of the research process • How findings are used to influence policy and practice.

The social experience of early childhood for children with learning disabilities: inclusion, competence and agency

This paper tells of the social experiences of three four‐year‐old children with learning disabilities as they negotiate their daily lives in their homes and early education settings in England. We apply a social model of childhood disability to the relatively unexplored territory of young children and use vignettes drawn from video observation to explore the interactive spaces contained in settings with different cultures of inclusion. Using a multimodal approach to the data we show the nuanced ways in which the children enact their agency. We explore the relationships between agency, culture and structure, and argue that children with learning disabilities are active in making meaning within social and relational networks to which they contribute differently depending on the barriers to doing and being that each network presents. Thus, the paper provides an original use of the notion of distributed competence.

The future-gazing potential of digital personalization in young children’s reading: views from education professionals and app designers

ABSTRACT This paper reports on UK primary school teachers’ and children’s app developers’ views about the potential of using personalized digital resources to promote young children’s reading and play with ‘smart toys’. Many existing digital resources are ‘personalised’, that is, the content of a story or game is tailored to an individual child, and the content is adjusted to the needs and preferences of a specific user (either by an adult, such as a parent, or through algorithmic calculation by digital software). In this study, we focused on the role of digital personalization in children’s play with smart toys and in early reading with personalized books. Focus group interviews were conducted with 10 primary school teachers and 14 book and digital industry professionals, and the resultant audio-recordings were analysed using inductive thematic analysis. A dominant theme was participants’ association of digital personalization with the potential both to enhance and to jeopardize children’s and adults’ agency. Overall, the convergence of the digital and personalized aspects in some books and toys constituted a source of concern, with different views offered by the teachers and designers.