Multimodal Visual Methods for ‘Seeing’ with Children

As a means of accessing voice, creative visual methods have become de rigour in research with children. However, their popularity can belie the multiple challenges inherent in their use. This includes how to meaningfully involve young children as knowledge producers and how to interpret children’s meaning-making practices, particularly for young children who are only beginning to use spoken language. This chapter addresses these challenges to consider how visual methods, offered as part of a collaborative, multimodal methodology, can support children’s participation and offer new perspectives on children’s ways of knowing. The chapter sets out the principles underpinning this methodology, drawing on examples from research undertaken in the UK in which photo-elicitation and puppet-production were employed with children during farm visits and museum trips to explore children’s experiences of agricultural landscapes. Data from the research (photographs, transcribed speech and body movement) are used to illustrate the ways in which visual methods within a collaborative, multimodal framework can support children’s linguistic and non-linguistic, visual and kinaesthetic meaning-making practices. The chapter then considers how visual methods within such a framework might be developed in future research with children.