In search of a Child’s perspective : Children´s writings on their own experiences from School age Educare

• Is it possible for us as researchers to see and understand the world from a child´s perspective? And to collect their experiences and stories about their everyday life. Here we present an attempt to do so. The arena for our study is School age Educare (SaE). The SaE setting has an educational and care focus before and after school, on children between ages 6 and 9. The premise of our study is the belief in the importance of finding research methods that can enhance our understanding of children’s everyday life from their own perspective – a child’s perspective – in contrast to the dominating child-perspective. The aim of this article/presentation is to discuss a research method tested in the of the SaE setting. Our theoretical framework is based on the sociology of childhood. Children´s worlds and peer culture are concepts in our analysis (Corsaro, 2009, 2015).The results show what the 15 children participating in the study do in the SaE setting, what they do with other children or teachers and where the children have done their activities. Some of the children have written answers to all of the questions and some have not. We wanted to examine if a method where the researcher had a minor role or visibility in the data collection could give another dimension for capturing children´s perspectives. The results told us about what the children have done in the SaE, with whom they have done it, what seemed to be important and what was not. The conclusion is that the research method is promising although it needs to be developed further.

Keyword

School age Educare

childs perspective

Publication and Content Type

vet (subject category)

kon (subject category)