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Abstract

This article provides an overview of the ethical tensions of preparing for ethnographic research with children in a rural district in Karnataka, India. Such children are at the receiving end of policy and international organisation interest, which alternately frames them as both victims of poverty and conflict and as agents of potential change in their communities. Additionally, researchers must often negotiate particularly muddy ethical waters when working with Majority World children from marginalised backgrounds. A critical exploration of the various complexities is provided in order to develop a working ethical framework. Of key importance is the need for reflexivity when journeying from western higher institutions (the ‘ivory tower’) to the ‘field’, a space and time carrying different weight and implications for the participants than the researcher. This article argues for the need to critically examine and weave in the multiple discourses of power that permeate children’s lives and engage with children’s responses to these discourses. While rural Karnataka provides a case study for the ethical tensions of ethnographic research with Majority World children from marginalised backgrounds, the principles espoused here are broadly applicable to children in a variety of contexts.

Keywords

Childhood studies critical ethnography global South north Karnataka research ethics

Introduction

Educational researchers working at the interstices of childhood and education research in Majority World countries face a daunting coalition of ethical and methodological tensions (Hanson et al., 2018). These tensions stem from the reality that most Majority World countries offer a narrower subset of opportunities than countries in the Minority World, where global economic centres of power are often located. This narrow subset is especially manifest in education and learning, where Majority World children often take up responsibilities such as work (domestic or paid), as well as engaging with inequitable education systems. While there are obviously exceptions, the hegemonic image of the Third World child has been cemented in the popular imagination, with Majority World childhoods presented as deviant and undesirable by various media and aid discourses. Despite the simplistic binaries the terms ‘Majority World’ and ‘Minority World’ invoke, I will use these terms as a reminder that normalised ideals of childhood are often powerfully projected onto Majority World children (Abebe, 2018, in Hanson et al., 2018: 274; Twum-Danso Imoh and Ame, 2012). Global movements to provide universal primary education have triggered a mushrooming of schools and narrowed the focus on schooling for all, with India mandating eight years of primary schooling in its 2009 Right to Education Act. Primary schooling has thus become a major cornerstone of childhood experience in India, although marginalised children often drop out at the secondary and tertiary levels (Prakash et al., 2017; Singh et al., 2018).

Despite the reams of research devoted to education in Majority World countries, only a fraction of it has hitherto centred on children’s experiences of schooling. However, paradigms such as the new sociology of childhood, which advocates for perceiving children as social actors and co-creators of culture, are filtering through education research, stirring discussions of power, privilege and ethics in research communities. Abebe and Waters (2016: 4) note the blossoming of scholarly interest in child-centred geographical and sociological research, claiming that it has reached ‘an all-time high’. Cultural norms and hegemonies often implicate and affect children, and, as James and Prout (2015: xii) argue, ‘through an insistence on the agency of children the concept of children’s culture can provide a critical dimension to the literature on cultural reproduction’. As the intended beneficiaries of education policy, children rarely have their voices or experiences of schooling solicited. Policies directed towards children are often couched in language that paints children as deviant or docile (Balagopalan, 2011). Children are expected to conform to policy expectations regarding learning and student achievement, often without a critical child-centred focus on the systems that may constrain their engagement in school.

This dynamic is especially noticeable in current education policy in rural Karnataka, India, where trends have moved towards soliciting community participation in government schools in attempts to promote both school accountability and student achievement. As a novice researcher preparing for doctoral research amongst rural schoolchildren in Karnataka, I will integrate some of the key concerns raised by childhood scholars to draw up a working framework of ethical considerations. Central to my ethical framework stand the methodological demands of critical ethnography and how varying strands of concerns raised in childhood studies and post-colonial studies may inform research committed to reflexivity and reciprocity with marginalised Majority World children. My proposed fieldwork will investigate rural community participation in children’s schooling, focusing especially on the voices of the children themselves. I argue that preserving a macro focus on systemic barriers narrated by students, as well as paying attention to the discourses of power articulated by parents, teachers and education policymakers, can help researchers paint an ethically and culturally sensitive portrait of the complex forces affecting children’s experiences of school and their potential for transformation.

Background: India’s education reform agenda

As the Indian government pursues its ambitious programme of national economic expansion, educational reform policy is increasingly revolving around the promise of the ‘community’ to implement education reform through participation in school governance (Govinda and Bandyopadhyay, 2010; Maithreyi and Sriprakash, 2018). School-based management has become increasingly popular and has manifested in various forms across Africa and South-East Asia (Patrinos et al., 2009). Government schooling in India has popularly been associated with low levels of student achievement and plagued with reports of teacher absence, lack of infrastructure (such as separate toilets for girls) and the use of curricula that are distant from children’s lived realities (Azam and Kingdon, 2015; Kremer et al., 2005; Sarin, 2015). Government schools do not invoke quality in the minds of parents, who tend to send their children to private schools if they can afford them (Chudgar and Quin, 2012; Nambissan, 2010). This creates a sharp class-based divide, where middle-class and affluent children attend private or international schools, which claim to offer greater teacher input and innovative pedagogies (Gilbertson, 2016). The proliferation of low-fee private schools in India testifies to the hold private schooling has on the parental imagination, with poor parents willing to sacrifice a portion of their household income for these schools, despite the free education provided at government schools (Chudgar and Quin, 2012; Srivastava, 2013). Parental framings of childhood, education and aspirations therefore play key roles in shaping children’s experiences and, with the trend of community involvement in government schools, parent understandings and expectations may be extended from home to school.

The case of Karnataka: the push for school development and management committees

Home to an increasing proliferation of information technology (IT) companies, start-ups and an expanding middle class, Karnataka’s capital, Bangalore, induces thrilling visions of the economic potential of India’s largely youthful population. The success of Bangalore’s IT industry has prompted Karnataka to declare itself a ‘knowledge economy’, with students framed in state education policy as ‘knowledge professionals’ (Karnataka State Education Policy, 2016). Yet Bangalore’s riches, in both knowledge and economics, present a stark contrast to the surrounding rural areas. According to the 2011 Government of India national census (Chandramouli & General, 2011), the district of Raichur reported a 60.46% literacy rate compared to the state average of 75%, while Bangalore itself reported an 88.48% literacy rate. This ‘educational divide’ has prompted the state government to introduce a set of education system improvements, one of the most contested and under-researched being school development and management committees (SDMCs).

SDMCs offer parents from the community, especially Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe parents, an opportunity to participate in school governance and development (Wankhede and Sengupta, 2005). In India, the national education policy sets out ambitious education policy and goals on a large scale, often influenced by worldwide agendas broadcast by powerful organisations such as the United Nations (Colclough and De, 2010; Nakray, 2018). It is up to state governments to implement policies such as the Right to Education Act in ways that are sensitive to state-particular characteristics in economic, linguistic and religious differences. Karnataka’s increasing reliance on its urban IT sector often obscures the fact that its rates of poverty decline are among the lowest in the country, and it is one of the least researched of India’s southern states (Pattenden, 2017). The state’s education policy reflects a desire to merge a continued and deeper interest in developing its technological advancements with national mandates on ensuring school attendance and quality for all levels of primary school. As Sriprakash (2012: 48) note: ‘state government perspectives on Education For All (EFA) appear to be increasingly entangled with Karnataka’s global technological outlook, as well as with the multiple political interests articulated in national policy discourses’.

Of particular interest to childhood scholars is how state education policies have evolved away from favouring a traditional rote-based memorisation system to promoting child-centred pedagogies and inviting public–private partnerships between IT companies and government schools to provide children with access to computers and IT lessons. While these partnerships are haphazard and currently understudied in the literature, the Nali Kali (‘Joyful Learning’) strategy has received more attention (Rajesh Raj et al., 2015; Sriprakash, 2012). Research has yielded mixed reports about the Nali Kali programme, which was started in the Mysore district in 1995. Sriprakash (2012), who conducted interviews with teachers as well as classroom observations, noted that teachers oscillated between following the mandates of child-centred pedagogies and the more teacher-centred practices they were accustomed to. Such see-sawing reflects the tensions that teachers grapple with in adjusting their former methods to current pedagogies. However, Sriprakash’s research did not solicit reflections from children or other community members, which leaves gaps in the extant research. How do children reconcile this bewildering fusion of pedagogies and progression of policies with the institutions of cultural bias and tradition that locate them on the bottom rungs of the social hierarchy? And what does this reconciliation, or the obverse (resistance), look like? In-depth ethnographies that centre on rural children’s experiences of schooling, such as Sarangapani’s (2003) study in a village near Delhi, are rare. Fifteen years of rapid policy and systemic change require that researchers re-solicit children’s voices and document their negotiations of the fluctuating educational and social landscape. State invitation of parental participation in public schooling through SDMCs extends the reach of community responsibility and accountability.

The SDMCs in Karnataka have a number of responsibilities, from ensuring children’s continued attendance at school to overseeing the school budget, advocating, building and maintaining amenities such as toilets, playgrounds and midday meals (Niranjanaradhya, 2014). In addition, they are expected to demonstrate a continued commitment to school development and student performance. Seats are reserved on SDMCs for women (50%) and Scheduled Castes or Scheduled Tribes. Additionally, child representatives from the upper-primary level are expected to hold seats on SDMCs (Niranjanaradhya, 2014). Almost nothing has been mentioned in the academic literature regarding these child representatives, showcasing the need for childhood research at the interface between community participation and school development. The problems plaguing the smooth running of SDMCs include elite capture, the inadequate training of parents, the haphazard occurrence of meetings, parent confusion over their roles and responsibilities, and the struggles of poor parents to reconcile these roles and responsibilities with the mandates of survival (Govinda and Bandyopadhyay, 2010; Narwana, 2015; Sharma et al., 2015). Yet the promise of SDMCs – the potential of community participation in school development – continues to be imposed on Majority World countries by organisations such as the World Bank, which argue that parental involvement in schools helps create and sustain structures of accountability, the lack of which fractures school quality and engenders student dropout and poor performance (Patrinos et al., 2009). Missing in these heated discussions are the voices of children. How do children conceptualise community involvement in their schooling? How do they navigate the changing winds of education policy along with the flows of globalisation and the crumbling bedrock of history and tradition? While the goals of the new sociology of childhood can function as a departure point, the work of childhood scholars in Majority World countries over the past decade has revealed that there must be more to the research process than extracting children’s experiences (Balagopalan, 2018, in Hanson et al., 2018: 286).

Ethical considerations of researching Majority World children

Education policy endeavours in India have so far concentrated on reform through adult figures, whether through training teachers in child-centred curricula or engaging parents in SDMCs. Students are presented as problems to be solved, with the focus on ‘missing’ children and school dropouts in development projects and discourse (Thangaraj, 2016). Yet, student voices and student perspectives are rarely solicited. Children occupy the unenviable position of being used as figures whose affective weight is leveraged in both national and international politics, with the figure of the ‘out-of-school child’ used to naturalise schooling and middle-class socio-economic aspirations (Balagopalan, 2014; Qvortrup, 2009). In spite of the scholarly consensus on the diversity and multiplicity of childhoods, Majority World children ingest educational policies that are increasingly imbued with the seemingly universal discourse of rights:

Despite extreme social and cultural diversity, there exists a core ideology in the South, around which official versions of childhood pivot. This ideology dictates that children are demarcated from adults by a series of biological and psychological, as opposed to social, characteristics that are universally valid. It also dictates that childhood is accompanied by a set of rights that can be enshrined in international law. (Boyden, 2003: 190)

As ‘co-producers of knowledge’ (Corsaro, 2015: 35), children create culture by their engagement and negotiation of social and cultural forms. This framing of children as co-creators of culture sits uneasily with a powerful discourse of children’s rights. With assessments and achievement rankings symbolically linked to national progress, national education policies often revolve around strengthening academic achievement. In Indian policy, children, and especially poor children, are therefore framed as unwitting indicators of progress (or the lack thereof). They are the bearers of national responsibility and, hence, national shame, the generation expected to display increasing levels of national educational development, but also the generation that most visibly hinders national development through their lack of scholastic achievement.

Reading through policy documents and understanding the educational burdens that rural schoolchildren face endows the researcher with a commitment to working at the intersection of policy expectations and children’s barriers in meeting these expectations. Through the development of new sociology of childhood theory in the past two decades, researchers have documented children’s responses to poverty and systemic oppression as thoughtful, analytical and diverse, revealing children’s changing realities in globalised contexts which wrestle with the modernising project of education and sedimented sociocultural barriers. In India, anthropologists have documented how marginalised rural schoolgirls struggle to reconcile the promises of schooling with the perceived stability of early marriage (Froerer, 2012). Froerer’s (2012) work cites parents who see safety and stability in teen marriage over the uncertain benefits of further schooling. Additionally, research from the 15-year Young Lives study in the neighbouring state of Andhra Pradesh illuminates the experiences of couples who have opted for early marriage, highlighting the inability of their schooling to provide them with basic sex education or medical advice about contraceptives (Crivello et al., 2018). Such research indicates a need not only to elicit children’s lived realities, but also to probe the greater social and economic forces that ultimately affect their life choices.

Critical ethnography: possibilities and hazards

The publication of ethnographic texts, especially in colonial contexts, often went hand in hand with colonial regimes and justified, rather than dismantled, the self-proclaimed cultural superiority of colonial empires. Critical ethnography thus arose as a response to criticisms of ‘traditional’ ethnography by affixing a political agenda to fieldwork. From its very conception, critical ethnography is fundamentally concerned with ethics: it ‘begins with an ethical responsibility to address processes of unfairness or injustice within a particular lived domain’ (Madison, 2012: 5). Thus, the notion of ethics is extended from protection – physical, social and emotional – to action, an engagement with structures of injustice woven around the researched population. Education is never neutral. It absorbs hegemonic ideologies and works to replicate them systematically, apotheosising assumptions as truths. These dominant ideologies crystallise neo-liberal values and perpetuate discourses of individual effort and merit. Such discourses have been revealed by critical scholars as both reductionist and reproducing systemic inequalities (McLaren, 2003; Willis, 2017).

Critical ethnographers have successfully exposed the ways in which social inequalities are perpetuated. Fitzpatrick’s (2013) work amongst Samoan, Tongan and Maori New Zealand high school islanders investigates their continued marginalisation in academics due to the lack of material resources such as computers at home. Despite having committed teachers, these students continued to struggle in school, suggesting that merely improving teacher accountability and commitment may not be the silver bullet that policymakers are hoping for. Critical ethnographers combine a commitment to research with a commitment to social activism, with this commitment manifesting in various forms. For Trueba (1999), critical ethnography is obligated not only to document ‘the nature of oppression’, but also to critically reflect and join with the oppressed in their journey towards liberation. Research is central to this process, as Ttueba writes:

there is an intimate relationship between the intellectual activity of research and the praxis of the daily life of researchers. Praxis (in Freire’s sense of political commitment to struggle for liberation and in defense of human rights) is the ultimate goal of critical ethnography. (Ttueba, 1999: 593)

Despite, or perhaps because of, this commitment to activism, critical ethnography does not score consistent victories over ‘traditional’ ethnography in its use amongst research students. The insistence that transformation must occur can put off researchers, who struggle with the ethical complexities of wanting to see genuine transformation in people’s lives without sallying forth as a sort of saviour figure, and thereby unconsciously perpetuating colonialist mentalities. Transformation is incredibly difficult to track; the glowing reports surrounding participatory methods have been tempered by researchers who have documented the various ways in which non-governmental organisations and researchers have prioritised short-term achievements over long-term change (Cooke and Kothari, 2001). Critical ethnography therefore holds out a catch-22: its ethical ambitions can be compromised by hard-headed commitment to those goals rather than the needs of the group under research. As Barab et al. (2004: 257) note: ‘The important point is that while we are building a thick description of the existing context, we are also positioned in a role in which we have a clear agenda and critical expertise to provide service and activities’. As for education, Ttueba (1999: 593) argues for ‘a realistic approach that links the creation of viable pedagogies to children’s empowerment’.

These ‘viable pedagogies’, in post-colonial contexts such as rural Karnataka, can be combined with an awareness of the discussions propagated by subaltern studies. My use of the term ‘subaltern’ is deliberate. As citizens located in the post-colonial/postmodern state of India, belonging to caste and social groups that are denied cultural power, I contend that the rural schoolchildren in my study could be regarded as ‘subaltern’, with all the understanding of oppression and potential for social change that the term carries. As leading post-colonial scholar De Kock (1992: 45) argued: ‘In post-colonial terms, everything that has limited or no access to the cultural imperialism is subaltern – a space of difference’. Sensitivity to the ‘subaltern’ can help mediate the particular ethical concerns that researchers can encounter, especially in research with children. Additionally, considering rural schoolchildren as subaltern levels a critical eye towards education policies that are often influenced by neocolonial agendas of organisations such as the World Bank, which, as discussed earlier, has pushed for school management committees in Majority World countries as a way to improve learning achievement, despite the lack of scholarly consensus that school management committees can impact student learning (Channa and Faguet, 2016). Indeed, Phillips’ (2013) ethnographic work in rural Tanzania reveals how expectations of community development and participation placed additional burdens on communities that were already struggling to survive.

The complexity of ethics as praxis in research with Majority World children

Ethical considerations present a complex terrain for incipient researchers armed with little else than institutional review board approval (Alderson and Morrow, 2011). University institutional review boards tend to take longer to process research applications for projects with child participants, as, understandably, children are considered automatically vulnerable due to their lack of sociopolitical power. Yet, in the field, I witnessed a lack of questioning on the part of the government officials at the Ministry of Education in my field district in Karnataka regarding ethical concerns. Indeed, when I finally received approval, not a single official sought to probe my methods, beyond asking me the location of the schools I wanted to do research in. This underscored my quandary: I had to wrestle with western-influenced ethical frameworks (themselves contested and in constant development) and an apparent lack of local governmental concern about my research practice.

Indeed, the miasma and lack of consensus or clarity may mean that researchers have to cobble together western frameworks, such as the UK Economic and Social Research Council’s Research Ethics Framework, with ethical frameworks from medical fields (e.g. the Indian Council of Medical Research’s (2006) guidelines for biomedical research), thanks in part to the lack of cohesiveness surrounding ethics committees in India (Jesani, 2009). The ethical ‘standpoint’ of the researcher – whether they will prioritise the position of children, teachers or parents (Alderson and Morrow, 2011) – is not quite so cut and dried for the critical ethnographer of education. To prioritise the viewpoint of children places the researcher in a potentially precarious position – by asking about the ‘voices’ of the children, Thangaraj (2016) was exposed to criticism about her ‘western training’ when discussing child labourers with non-governmental-organisation officials in India. If there is one thing researchers are wary of in Majority World contexts, it is the neocolonial implications of arriving with ‘western agendas’. Yet, if advocating for the voices of children in spaces where their voices are not solicited is deemed ‘western’, the researcher is placed in the unenviable position of cleaving to her or his ideological beliefs with the possibility of being perceived as privileging ‘western’ practices instead of cultural sensitivity.

Consent entails further ethical tangles. During the initial weeks of my research, I received permission from the headmaster of a village school to do group research with a class of children whose teacher was not present. My translator and I entered the classroom and requested volunteers from the children, after explaining that we wanted to ask questions and explaining that they could withdraw at any time. The children appeared excited to participate, and my translator chose four children at random from those who raised their hands. However, another teacher, whose classroom we had just left, soon followed us (leaving her own students unattended) out of curiosity as to what we would do. As we asked questions, she admonished the children, telling them to speak up and, in some instances, supplying them with answers, which they dutifully repeated to us. While I understood that the teacher was trying to help us, her presence and actions highlighted the power differentials in the space, resulting in what I viewed as coercion. I have decided not to use these children’s answers in my data analysis as an ethical stance against how these answers were collected. However, this incident has led me to refocus on the classroom space and probe how these spaces are closely controlled under the term ‘discipline’, where children are schooled into ideals of submissiveness and propriety. This is especially striking given that many children in government schools are Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe, occupying the lowest rungs of the social hierarchy. I subsequently conducted group interviews with children in the outdoor corridors, which were simultaneously away from the classrooms and near enough for school staff to observe us. Alderson and Morrow (2011) report researchers in India discussing whether to ask children for their consent away from the gaze of gatekeepers, in order to ensure that the children’s consent was not coerced by powerful adults. However, children may not necessarily be comfortable giving consent without consultation with or input from the adults in their lives. Additionally, cultural mores in Karnataka emphasise vertical relations between children and adults in positive terms. Parents and teachers may be offended by not being consulted over children for whom they have a cultural obligation to be morally invested. The researcher is therefore required to execute a complicated dance, where they cannot alienate gatekeepers while ensuring that the child’s consent is genuinely given.

Added to the practice of external ethical requirements is a commitment to reflexively examine how development discourse and academic discourse, as well as practice, can constrain children further. Qualitative researchers of childhood in India note how childhood is ‘reinscribed as a period of appropriate dependence on adults and appropriate development and discipline in school’ (Thangaraj, 2016: 200). This formation of the schooled child sits uneasily with the agency prescribed in education development discourses. As scholars amongst children in India have demonstrated, such narrow prescriptions of agency and transformation effectively jettison the majority of children, who struggle to reconcile these supposedly heartening messages with their lived realities (Froerer, 2012; Shah, 2016). A commitment to critical pedagogic research takes a commitment to the subaltern as the heart of its research inquiry, trying to gauge the ways in which power schools children into prescriptive ways of being.

How subaltern studies can inform ethical concerns

Gayathri Chakravorty Spivak’s (1988) seminal essay ‘Can the subaltern speak’ highlights the lack of access the subaltern has to a politically authorised stage. Indeed, children are often told (or made to understand implicitly) that unless they learn the institutionalised language of the school, their voices and their trajectories are doomed to remain on the fringes of transformation. Spivak gives a potent example of the ethical implications of soliciting children’s voices by questioning education practices which effectively school children into silence:

There is a tiny exchange on page 69 of the book: ‘On the day of our visit [to a school in Medinipur], we interviewed four children of Class 4 … well, can you tell us something about what was taught? All four children were silent.’

Part of the silence rises from the very class apartheid that bad rural education perpetuates. The relationship between the itinerant inspector and the child is, in addition, hardly ethical. (Spivak, 2002: 26)

Counteracting potential neocolonialist aspects of a critical ethnographic project is therefore an ethical mandate for the critical ethnographer of education. While children’s silences can be regarded as potential data (Spyrou, 2016), the researcher must differentiate between which silences are a result of the erasure of voice and which silences contribute positively to the diversity of children’s ‘voice’. Together with an imperative for reflexivity and the imperative for advocacy is the imperative for ‘engaged listening’ (Forsey, 2010: 560).

The concerns of childhood studies and the directives of critical ethnography must be linked with the imperative raised in subaltern studies: to listen. This imperative takes ethical precedence over the others in Majority World settings in order to allay fears of reproducing neocolonial power imbalances. Listening can pave the way for contextually appropriate reciprocity where the researcher is guided by the children they are studying. After all, ethnographers do exercise ultimate editorial authority: ‘all ethnographical descriptions are home-made … they are the describer’s descriptions, not those of the described’, as anthropologist Clifford Geertz (1988: 144–145) famously claims. However, a commitment to active listening can go some way to attaining the balance of researcher authority with participant voice: ‘Personalized and individualized, the children tell us about their everyday experiences of the social world and reveal, in this case, the hidden hurts and humiliations that many children experience, and which adults often dismiss as unimportant’ (James, 2007: 264). Whether it is through thoughtful deliberation on job opportunities and schooling (Sarangapani, 2003) or displaying canny knowledge of economic enterprise (Iversen, 2002), Indian children’s reflections on the intersections of childhood, community and schooling promise ‘an uncovering of the reality of children’s lives’ (Bluebond-Langner and Korbin, 2007: 242) that may feed into more informed Karnataka education policy in the future.

Conclusion

Children in government schools in rural Karnataka often battle socio-economic marginalisation, which sits uneasily with an education development discourse trumpeting messages of impending transformation. The school turns into a space where they are schooled into submissive ideals rather than a place where they can be critically engaged. As a novice researcher working at the interstices of critical ethnography, childhood studies and subaltern studies, I have attempted to weave in critical discussions raised in these fields to construct a working ethical framework. My argument is that ethics should run through the whole system of research, informing not only the research methodology, but also theory. Rather than succumbing to the ‘romance of agency’ (Abebe, 2018, in Hanson et al., 2018), I argue for a need to critically examine and weave in the multiple discourses of power that permeate children’s lives and engage with children’s responses to these discourses. Viewing children as cultural agents (Qvortrup, 2009), such a framework attempts to encompass the diverse ways in which children both challenge and comply with systemic injustice. Critical ethnographic methodologies have much to contribute to childhood studies, especially in the light of education development trends which are moving towards a focus on the community as well as school.

Engaging in critical ethnographic research amongst children in rural Karnataka not only insists on the importance of viewing children as an indispensable part of the social fabric; it can also contribute to calls for the extension of ethnographies of childhood, especially in areas of heightened education policy activity. Education development discourse requires critical input from the students it claims to serve. It therefore must be subject to continuous analysis, and must engage children in continuous creative discussion, if we are to produce a research culture that, as Trueba (1999: 593) argues, represents ‘the consequences of how we live and act for the less privileged’.

Footnotes

Funding

The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The fieldwork for this project proceeded thanks to a scholarship from the College of Social Sciences at the University of Glasgow, UK.

Author biography

Rebecca Ipe is a doctoral student at the University of Glasgow. Her research interests revolve around the intersections of education, development, community participation in schools, and childhood studies.

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