Journal of Early Childhood Research

Young children often use actions rather than talk as they interact with objects and each other to strategically shape the social, material, and cultural environment. New dynamic research designs and methods are needed to capture the collaborative learning and social positioning achieved through children’s non-verbal interactions. Mediated discourse analysis (MDA), a hybrid ethnographic/sociolinguistic approach rooted in cultural-historical activity and practice theories, analyzes mediated actions with objects. A three-year ethnographic study of children’s literacy play illustrates the five-stage process in MDA research design that resulted in microanalysis of children’s activity with social practices, positioning and spaces that included and excluded peers.

Including children as research participants is an important new direction in early childhood research. However, it is rare for such studies to include the voices of children with significant communication impairment. This article suggests that drawing may be an appropriate non-verbal method for ‘listening’ to these children’s ideas and recording their perspectives. Three areas of inquiry are reviewed: (1) the use of drawings as a method of listening respectfully to children; (2) approaches to the analysis of children’s drawings; and (3) the analysis of drawings completed by children with communication impairment. We identify six aspects of children’s drawings — facial expressions, accentuation of body features (e.g. mouth and ears), portrayal of talking/listening, colours used, conversational partners, and sense of self — that are potentially pertinent for children with communication impairment.

Research into the lives of children with acquired brain injury (ABI) often neglects to incorporate children as participants, preferring to obtain the opinions of the adult carer (e.g. McKinlay et al., 2002). There has been a concerted attempt to move away from this position by those working in children’s research with current etiquette highlighting the inclusion of children and the use of a child-friendly methodology (Chappell, 2000). Children with disabilities can represent a challenge to the qualitative researcher due to the combination of maintaining the child’s attention and the demands placed on them by their disability. The focus of this article is to discuss possible impediments to interviewing children with acquired brain injury (ABI) and provide an insight into how the qualitative researcher may address these.

There is a need to reflect on both the processes and outcomes of the range of approaches aimed at promoting children’s engagement in research, with the specific intent of listening to children’s voices. This article considers some of the ethical tensions we have experienced when engaging children in research about their prior-to-school and school environments and their perspectives of the transitions between these environments. Examples from projects conducted in Iceland and Australia are drawn upon to illustrate these tensions and, to reflect on the strategies and questions we have developed to guide our engagement with children. This article raises issues rather than offering simple solutions. We suggest that there are a number of contextual and relational variables that guide our research interactions, and no ‘one best solution’ applicable to all contexts. Our aim in sharing these tensions is to stimulate further debate and discussions around children’s participation in research.

Dialogic research, building on the dialogic philosophy of Mikhail Bakhtin, is fundamentally concerned with the social, discursive nature of language. This article describes an application of dialogic research methods in a pilot study conducted in an Education and Care setting in Wellington, New Zealand focusing on an 18-month-old toddler and his teacher. The purpose of this exploratory study was to ‘operationalize’ dialogic research within this early childhood education context, in preparation for a larger investigation. Approaching the field through this dialogic research method offered an alternative means of investigating the acts of a toddler through genre (as the framework of analysis) and utterance (as the unit of analysis). This article argues for dialogic research as a method which enables toddler and teacher ‘voices’ to authentically inter-animate and contribute accordingly to the research process, thus promoting hermeneutic complexity rather than scientific truth.

The purpose of this article is to engender a space where a variety of critical feminist(s) lenses are interwoven to problematize current discursive practices in linguistic diversity training and to (re)imagine nueavas posibilidades for linguistic diversity research/training for pre-kindergarten teachers. Transnational feminists’ projects have the potential to illuminate and connect larger global issues with, and that pertain to, local and specific radical projects by incorporating critical reflexive methodological tools. In this article we propose to a) discuss language as a monocultural construction that limits conceptions of language and learning for younger human beings; b) examine the discursive practices of teachers of students who are English as second/third language learners; c) discuss the discourse of sharing codes of power; and finally d) scrutinize interventionist assumptions of educational research.