Engaging young language learners in participatory research: Visual arts-based approach

This paper explores the visual arts-based approach to participatory research with children, aged 9 to 11, by analysing the micro-processes of children agentively making meanings in individual and group interviews. Specifically, drawing and graphing are utilised to facilitate participants’ thinking, verbalisation, and nonverbal expressions during data elicitation. We draw on two example qualitative studies to discuss the innovative methods. By interpreting critical episodes emerging from visual arts-crafting activities, we find a mixed set of visual tools empowering in listening to children's voices in hierarchical bilingual educational contexts, including two schools and a private language institution. The methodological insights are examined in line with two overarching themes: a) the mediational and scaffolding role of visual artefacts in children's embodied meaning-making processes, and b) children's strategic appropriation of activities to address their own personal and social goals. Findings indicate that, as local actors, young participants agentively claim expertise resorting to ‘insider knowledge’ of childhood, subvert the prescribed power status in relation to adult researchers, and strategically appropriate research instruments for reinterpreting the research agenda. We argue a glimpse of children's multi-faceted lifeworlds and peer culture is temporarily made possible by means of visual arts-based approach, generating data that is otherwise hard to elicit or interpret.