Creating the space for autistic children’s agency and genuine engagement in research

Despite the growing prominence of partnering with children in educational research to influence educational policies and practices, autistic children’s voices and influence for change remain a developing area. There is a growing recognition of autistic children as experts and influencers in their lived experiences, along with a call for their more authentic engagement in the research process as rights-holders. This requires a reconsideration of methodological approaches that are actively child-centric and involve researchers who can enact this imperative in their research. This paper argues that autistic children have legitimate claims to be research participants on their own terms, interrupting and creating new meanings within the intended research process. By drawing on examples from an ethnographic study with two autistic children in a New Zealand school, we demonstrate practices where the researcher challenges and is challenged by research with children who think, act, and learn in diverse ways. Results from research that is child-led and child-rights framed provide unique insights into the children’s world. When researchers adopt reflexive and adaptive ethical data collection approaches for authentic engagement in the children’s world, the children’s views come through different spaces and influence in ways that counter a dominant narrative about autistic children.