Description: This volume critically examines issues of power and voice in research with children. Chapters focus on the relationship between researchers and children and explore how to more adequately represent the complexities, multiple perspectives, and understandings that emerge when the research process more fully includes children and youth. Contributors explore issues of imposition and power that are inherent in traditional research and even more problematic with children. Authors document how children's voices can guide us in learning about research methodologies, theories, and praxis, as well as about issues of race, identity, class, linguistic diversity and gender within larger postcolonial contexts and research traditions.
Review Quotes: 'Power and Voice in Research with Children' is exemplary of the new reconceptualist scholarship in early childhood education that rethinks the nature and process of doing research with children. Employing critical humanistic and decolonizing methodologies that respect what children have to say and that are attentive to and appreciative of their complex modalities of expression, the authors of 'Power and Voice in Research with Children' refuse to reduce childrens' voices to sterile categorizations and passive articulations. The result is an important book that bravely challenges dominant theoretical approaches in early childhood education as well as dominant cultural formations and social relations within the wider capitalist societies. (Peter McLaren, Professor of Urban Schooling, Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, University of California, Los Angeles)
Throughout the world, children coming to the schooling enterprise from linguistic and cultural groups that differ from the mainstream confront a set of intellectual, social and cultural transitions that are too often a disadvantage to their educational well being. 'Power and Voice in Research with Children' is simultaneously challenging and instructive to our research and practice colleagues about such circumstances and provides insights regarding research and practice that helps us to grasp the intricacies of diversity and early schooling. I congratulate the diversity of thinking among the editors and authors in their elegant and critical contribution. (Eugene E. Garcia, Dean, College of Education, Arizona State University, Tempe)