The Practice of Listening to Children: The Challenges of Hearing Children Out in an Adult-Regulated World

By Haeny S. Yoon, T. Templeton. Harvard Educational Review, 2019

106 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In this research article, Haeny Yoon and Tran Nguyen Templeton explore the challenges of listening to children in both classrooms and research that purports to center young children. Through two stories from their respective studies, Yoon and Templeton highlight the complexities of following children's leads given the competing agendas situating the work of teachers and researchers in neoliberal contexts. Time constraints, curricular mandates, and research expectations limit children's valuable contributions to their sociocultural communities. The authors' goal is to discuss the possibilities in taking up children's words, gestures, and moves as knowledge. They contend that children's voices should not simply be heard for curricular purposes, for adults' amusement, to forward a neoliberal agenda, or to maximize our own goals and pursuits. Instead, we should listen to understand the creativity and intelligence of young children whose social worlds are meaningful.

Subfields: Education, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a66cf84e8e61d0b16a6406a8864496eb5219c4e8