Interviewing young children

Abstract

Interviewing children presents special challenges and special rewards. The challenges include designing innovative ways of researching, where children engage purposefully with the researcher, feel free to express their own views or ideas and are not put in situations where they are preoccupied with trying to find out the purpose of a question or activity and to respond to the adult’s sometimes hidden agenda. On the other side, the rewards can include children’s ability to provide thoughtful contributions to our understanding of their views and the unique way they read and understand their life contexts.

Focusing on interviewing children for research and practice development, I will use data from a research project using different interview techniques with children in two Portuguese Pre-school classrooms. In both, a particular pedagogical model, the Portuguese Modern School Movement (MEM), was used by the teachers. The study examined this pedagogical model for pre-school education in practice and analysed how this ‘cultural tool’ mediated (afforded or constrained) processes associated with children’s learning to learn (Folque, 2008). Children’s ages in Portuguese pre-schools range from 3 to 6 years olds, they remain with the same staff and in these mixed age cohorts. The contribution of children’s views of some of the model’s components was crucial in fully understanding the cultures of learning that were being generated in each classroom and the way the MEM pedagogy was mediating the learning cultures. Listening to children is always useful, but in this study of a pedagogy focused on communities of learning, the children’s views were as important as those of the teachers and other adults.