Listening to Young Children: A Mosaic approach

Abstract

The inclusion of children’s responses in research of educational settings are important and have been described as a pertinent tool to understand and be aware of children’s perspectives that adults may not be aware of (Lundqvist, 2014).  Sheridan (2011) further expresses that the “evaluation of quality of early childhood education must include the voices of children” and is an essential part of the overall understanding of early childhood education.  The responses and voices of young children reflect diverse forms of communicating, representing and interpreting their thoughts and emotions. This paper will present some models that can help guide the researcher to make decisions about how a child can participate in the research activity.  Specifically, I will describe the use of an ethnographic combined with Clark and Moss’s Mosaic approach to researching with children.