Imagining the child’s perspective: pre-service social studies teachers’ visual representations of childhood vulnerability, empathy, and moral meaning

This study examined how social studies teacher trainees construct meanings of childhood vulnerability through visual and written representations, with particular attention to empathic perspective-taking and moral meaning-making. Rather than conceptualising vulnerability as individual fragility, the study examined how children were positioned in relation to voice, agency, rights, and structural conditions. An interpretative qualitative design integrating art-based inquiry, multimodal visual analysis, and reflexive thematic analysis was employed with 51 fourth-year social studies teacher trainees at a state university in Türkiye. During a 14-week Art and Museum Education module, participants produced visual works addressing childhood vulnerability and accompanying reflective texts, generating 51 paired visual–textual units. Analysis identified three interrelated patterns: the paradox of visibility, in which children were made visually salient yet remained discursively silent ( n = 20); the construction of vulnerability through enclosure, fragmentation, and control ( n = 17); and a shift from emotional response towards an ethical encounter grounded in empathy, rights, and professional responsibility ( n = 14). Frequencies indicate the dominant theme of each unit; many units also carried features of the other themes. Because the production guidelines explicitly invited participants to draw on the child’s perspective, the findings are interpreted as showing how participants enacted an invited perspective-taking task. Across these patterns, visual representations sometimes positioned children as passive objects of concern, while written reflections extended or challenged these meanings by foregrounding perspective, agency, structural inequality, and rights. The findings suggest that empathic perspective-taking may involve more than emotional concern, encompassing an interpretative process that connects another’s perspective with recognition of injustice, rights, and responsibility. The study contributes to psychological understandings of empathy and moral meaning by showing how multimodal meaning-making can illuminate the movement from witnessing vulnerability to ethically positioning the vulnerable other.