Abstract
Stirling and Yamada-Rice’s edited volume, Visual Methods with Children and Young People, is a collection of 13 chapters dealing with current issues when using visual research methods and their affordances to make sense of children and young people. The notion of visual methods is defined as research methods that contain any visual component in their production, analysis or propagation. The chapters are organized into three parts by themes: (1) Meaning making and production, (2) Remixing, creativity and mess and (3) Beyond ethics. A distinct feature of the book is the editors’ attempt to invite voices from industry professionals. The visual industry representatives’ perspectives are presented in the last chapter of each part as they share their experiences in producing visual output for children and young people. By combining perspectives from both the academy and the visual industry, while critically examining research ethics, the editors challenge taken-for-granted ideas in visual research methods developed from Western-dominant and adult-centred ideologies and successfully offer methodological insights into future visual research with children and young people. A set of reflective discussion questions follows at the end of some chapters, which guide the reader to gain concrete and practical insights in to conducting their own visual research projects.
Part 1 comprises four chapters, in which the relationship between production (making) and meaning-making (knowing) in visual research is discussed. With a review of four empirical studies on meaning-making with movement, music, photographs and drama, Rowsell’s chapter highlights that meanings can be visualised through a multitude of modes and that visual methods can be an effective tool for capturing meaning-making processes. In the following chapter, Hackett and Yamada-Rice discuss ways of understanding children’s meaning-making practices in relation to their interactions with places based on two ethnographic studies with young children, one in museums and the other in Japanese urban landscapes. Pushing back against the dominant models of communication that merely focus on the verbal aspect of language from Western- and adult-centric viewpoints, Hackett and Yamada-Rice argue that researchers should pay attention to understanding the spatial and embodied nature of young children’s meaning-making and to producing visual records to make sense of young children’s interactions with places. Procter and Hatton’s chapter explores issues of power in terms of shaping children’s participation in visual research, their production of visual artefacts and constructing personal and collective meanings between children and researchers. Drawing on two visual-research studies on children within school contexts, Procter and Hatton underscore the need for researchers to attend to power dynamics in order to examine the issue of agency and voice in meaning-making events. Part 1 ends with an interview between Yamada-Rice and four visual industry professionals. Challenging adult-oriented perspectives that undervalue children’s abilities, they suggest that children should be positioned at the centre of production and meaning-making processes in visual fields.
The second part of the book, divided into three chapters, discusses remixing, creativity and mess, which are vital processes that need to be taken into consideration when seeking innovative ways of using visual methods. Parry’s chapter indicates that visual and arts-based research (e.g. creating films with children) empowers children within the research process by leading them to engage in a creative process where they remix their interests and lived experiences. Parry considers researchers as co-creators and collaborators with children in the production of films. She points out that researchers in arts-based research should acknowledge the messiness of children’s lives and pay attention to children’s cultural and creative contexts that inform evolving research methodologies. The use of remixing, creativity and mess is the focus of Claisse and Sun’s study on designing video games for hospitalised children who have limited access to both online and offline play. By combining the perspectives from three stakeholder groups, academics, play specialists and game designers, Claisse and Sun provide the reader with ways of using remixing, creativity and mess as potential methodological approaches to offer new and meaningful insights into conducting visual research. The following chapter covers Stirling’s interview with four visual industry representatives, which helps the reader to recognise remixing as a powerful tool, not only in the visual industries but also in visual research. According to these visual industry representatives, remixing is a creative tool that enables them to move forward from what has already been done in their design approach. Remixing involves reworking previous work with a different focus as well as interdisciplinary collaboration, which refers to working with people in different fields and people who are not ordinarily considered as members of a certain project. Remixing in the visual industries offers an alternative perspective to view children not merely as research participants, but also as active agents in creating unique remixing in the visual-research process.
The last part of the book comprises five chapters pertinent to research ethics. The first four chapters discuss ethical considerations in the employment of visual research methods and kinds of research practices. Woods’ chapter problematizes that research ethics has been regarded as an institutionalised rite of passage that researchers should undergo to initiate a research study. Woods calls for moving away from superficial approaches to more sophisticated approaches to ethics, particularly to the ethical working relationship between researchers and children. While acknowledging that the use of visual methods facilitates children’s agentic participation in the research process, Woods critically examines a patronizing perspective on the use of visual methods that claims that adults allow children’s voices to be heard. As Woods shows, children already voice their lives in multiple ways, most of which are not validated by adults. For example, children’s seemingly simple play is full of complexities that cannot be understood by adults’ ways of interpretation. Woods argues that the visual product itself is not enough for researchers to capture the entire intended meaning. Similarly, Hall discusses how researchers should interpret the visual, particularly children’s drawings, by attending to power issues in meaning-making, as well as research relationships. Hall argues that fuller understandings of children’s ideas and experiences can be captured by enabling children to engage in dialogue about their drawings in the research process and empowering them to be expert informers on their drawings. Hall, Pahl and Pool’s chapter deals with ethical concerns vis-à-vis digital technologies when they are used by and for children during the research design and process. While recognising the digital as an effective tool for grasping and representing children’s voices, Hall, Pahl and Pool draw the reader's attention to issues of power in relation to children’s digital productions (e.g. who produces what for whom with what among what?) and provide useful techniques for tackling difficulties that may arise when utilising digital tools in the research process based on hands-on experience. The following chapter describes Stirling’s dialogue with three media-industry representatives. The chapter explores visual industry perspectives on ethical issues concerning production, participation and utilisation for and by children. Viewing children as experts in their field, the industry partners stress the importance of listening to children’s voices and outline how the practice influences their designs. The final chapter of Part 3 ends with Marsh’s concise summary of the book, with her reflections on issues regarding the use of visual methods with, or for, children.
The book provides innovative perspectives in the field of visual research, with specific attention paid to children and young people. By highlighting the power of remixing, this book broadens the simplified view of using visual means and of defining literacy within social-science research. It also offers new possibilities for conducting future visual research to capture the nuances of children’s and young people’s lives. Stirling and Yamada-Rice encourage researchers to link academic expertise with industrial techniques from a range of disciplines and to acknowledge children as co-producers in visual research. The book’s contributors collectively argue for the importance of foregrounding children’s perspectives and acknowledging children’s evolving interpretations over time. The ethnographic orientation of the book offers critical reflection on issues related to building ethical relationships with young children. Nonetheless, the book would have been more useful if the authors had shed further light on the dynamic relationships between researchers and children and if there was more detail on complex relational interactions in connection with visual production, analysis and dissemination.
In summary, this book is a timely, relevant addition to the early childhood field, given the proliferation of visual and digital tools in the world today. Early childhood researchers can benefit from reading the book in terms of gaining alternative, ethical and reflective insights into their data collection, analysis and representation in their visual research process with children. Although this volume is explicitly intended for researchers who make use of visual methods with or for children, early childhood educators can gain insights into pedagogical implications from reading this book, which might help them to understand children as agentic in their learning process and children’s visual production, such as drawings, as an important site for accessing children’s understandings and world views.