Abstract
In this chapter the active participation of children in production processes of knowledge inherent to the ethnographic research and the possibility that ethnography with kids features to enrich the interpretation processes in educational research argues. Through a report on the process by which the researcher worked with the children to produce ethnography of his neighborhood in the greater Buenos Aires region interpretive work is discussed. On one side showed how children interpret their environment sometimes aligned adults meanings and sometimes did not, but in all cases their interpretations may shed light on public perceptions of the social world to which they belong. Furthermore, the moments when the action researcher found children without reveals seek explanations and came to understand through subsequent visits to the streets or in the interaction with the children are reported. The general argument is that children are reflective thinkers. If you sometimes go through the process of socialization so are adults occasionally, and certainly ethnographers. The dislocation that resulted in the researcher herself in the ways of being and interacting children have recovered in this chapter in order to show the contrast of reflexivity that connects along the ethnographic fieldwork
A preliminary version of this work was published in Spanish in the volume compiled by Milstein, Clemente, Dantas-Whitney, Guerrero and Higgins (2011) Encuentros etnográficos con niños y adolescentes. Entre tiempos y espacios compartidos
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Notes
- 1.
“Anthropological pioneers like Malinowski, Mead, and Sapir identified ways in which childhood was worthy of ethnographic attention, and the literature grew at an increasing pace from the 1920s to the present” (Levine 2007, p. 155).
- 2.
- 3.
In order to have an idea of the dimensions of this percentage, one must consider that during the same period, the national average of unemployment and underemployment oscillated between 25 % and 30 %.
- 4.
The Plan Vida (the Life Plan) was organized and subsidized by the Provincial Council of the Family and Human Development of the province of Buenos Aires designed to distribute milk and cereals to pregnant women and children younger than 5 years old.
- 5.
In 1996, this elementary school was transformed into a general basic school by a law passed 2 years before, a law meeting resistance by the majority of teachers’ unions. This implied the incorporation of teaching and non-teaching personnel and of students who up to this point attended junior high schools that worked in other buildings. In order to accommodate these students, there was a precarious and hurried expansion of the building that did not meet the basic necessities for the institution.
- 6.
In the colloquial language of the River Plate area, the term “choreo” is a lower kind of theft, done in a stealthily, without violence and on a low scale.
- 7.
The word “changa” means temporary manual work that was sporadic and informal, done by a worker in exchange for a modest sum, with no permanent connection to the contractor.
- 8.
This expression originated in the 1990s in Argentina among poor and unemployed sectors in order to describe the work that some people did for governing politicians on the national, provincial, and municipal levels.
- 9.
The term “cartonero” alludes to the job of collecting cardboard, paper, and other urban residuals for recycling, done by one’s own initiative at the margins of the work of collectors of refuse and in which were involved families, including children.
- 10.
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Kathryn Anderson-Levitt for her comments and suggestions that improved both plot development and writing, in all cases. Writer/translator Adam Sederlin translated this text into English.
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Milstein, D. (2015). 3.2 Constructing Collaborative Interpretations: Children as Co-researchers in an Ethnographic Study in Argentina. In: Smeyers, P., Bridges, D., Burbules, N., Griffiths, M. (eds) International Handbook of Interpretation in Educational Research. Springer International Handbooks of Education. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9282-0_25
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