Hearing Out Children’s Narrative Pathways To Adulthood

Participatory research with children in the main focuses on short-term interactions. As this practice develops, questions about longer-term consequences for participants have arisen, examining the empowering claims for this research approach. This article reports the findings from continued contact with participants of an ethnographic participatory research project. Longitudinal interviews emphasize the lasting influence of their experience of adults in primary school and the resulting constructions of learning relationships. Their perceptions of authority, discipline, violence and justice are portrayed as pivotal in these young people’s transitions to more mature identities. In the cluster of narratives the research discussion elicits, these themes interweave. The article demonstrates that understanding the significance and meaning of children’s perspectives is a process that unfolds over time, and requires, as Christensen and Prout advocate, continuing dialogues with children and with social science colleagues. This process leads this researcher to a reassessment of what constitutes ‘participation’. The power constraints of which children are keenly aware shape the extent to which they engage in participatory research and the ways in which they may find it empowering.