Power & Voice in Research with Children

The Editors: Lourdes Diaz Soto is a graduate of Hunter College and The Pennsylvania State University. She has taught and worked with families and children in Puerto Rico (Dorado Academy), Florida (Florida Atlantic University), New York City (Teachers College, Columbia University), and Pennsylvania (Lehigh University and Penn State). Her publications include Language, Culture, and Power: Bilingual Families Struggle for Quality Education and two edited volumes published by Peter Lang, Making a Difference in the Lives of Bilingual/Bicultural Learners and The Politics of Early Childhood Education. Scholarship and collegial opportunities have taken her to Costa Rica, Greece, Spain, Taiwan, and Uruguay. In addition, she has published numerous refereed articles and book chapters examining issues of social justice and equity.Beth Blue Swadener is Professor of Early Childhood Education and Policy Studies at Arizona State University and does research on social policy, professional development, language and culture issues, and early education in Sub-Saharan Africa. Her books include: Reconceptualizing the Early Childhood Curriculum; Children and Families «At Promise»: Deconstructing the Discourse of Risk; Semiotics of Dis/ability: Interrogating Categories of Difference; Does the Village Still Raise the Child?: A Collaborative Study in Changing Childrearing and Early Education in Kenya; and Decolonizing Research in Cross-Cultural Contexts: Critical Personal Narratives. Dr. Swadener is also active in a number of peace, social justice, and child advocacy groups.

• Contents: Joe L. Kincheloe: Foreword – Lourdes Diaz Soto/Beth Blue Swadener: Introduction – Lourdes Diaz Soto: Children Make the Best Theorists – Janette Habashi: Freedom Speaks – Jennifer Jipson/Janice Jipson: Confidence Intervals: Doing Research with Young Children – Elizabeth Graue/Margaret Hawkins: Relations, Refractions, and Reflections in Research with Children – Brian Edmiston: Coming Home to Research – Marguerite Vanden Wyngaard: Culturally Relevant Pedagogy: 4Rs = Bein’ Real – Yu-Chi Sun: Listening to the Voices of Chinese Immigrant Girls – Mindy Blaise: Performing Femininities through Gender Discourses – Susan Matoba Adler: Asian-American Children Developing Voice – Aggelos Hatzinikolaou/Soula Mitakidou: Roma Children: Building «Bridges» – Beth Blue Swadener: Kenyan Street Children Speak through Their Art – Lourdes Diaz Soto/Juliana Lasta: Bilingual Border-Crossing Children’s Ideological Becoming – Min Hong/Celia Genishi: Voices of English Language Learners – Carmen Martínez-Roldán: Bilingual Children in Literature Discussions – Cathy Guitierrez-Gomez: Children’s Retelling – Carmen Medina/Kelly Bradburry/Susan Pearson: Los Poetas – Eric Malewski: Epilogue: When Children and Youth Talk Back: Precocious Research Practices and the Cleverest Voices.

«‘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)