Children as Researchers

Abstract

The purpose of the two ethnographic studies was to identify and explore children’s playground games and rhymes in ‘the new media age’ and in the context of the cultures and practices of childhood. Given the focus of the project on children’s playground activities, the project drew on the particular cultural knowledge of the key participants — children themselves. A central tenet of the methodological approach was that children should be engaged as active participants in the research. It was important, for example, that their cultural knowledge should be passed on in ways that enabled them to exercise their rights to privacy and autonomy. This chapter reflects on approaches to the engagement of children in the study and examines how children were positioned in the research project. It was clear that the children had a key role in organising and passing on knowledge about their own cultural practices to adult researchers. Their role as mediators of such knowledge is a central focus for this chapter and, in the following discussion, we consider the sometimes difficult task of conceptualising this role more fully. This was not a matter that we could settle easily and, even among the research team, there was no easily secured consensus. We should therefore begin by highlighting some of the questions we wish to address. For example, are children experts in their own cultural practices?