Mira! Looking, Listening, and Lingering in Research With Children

This article considers the importance of visual art research with children as a means of understanding contemporary cultural practices, particularly the choices children make in representing their cultural experience in drawings and through the dialogues that surround them. The intricacies of relationship between the image of the child held by adults—parents, teachers, and researchers—and the children they hope to educate and understand, and the relationship between child and adult cultures, present tensions between expectations, ideals, and realities, between the lived experiences of contemporary children and the often imperfectly remembered childhoods of the previous generation. A pedagogy of listening is suggested as a way of knowing children within the type of "third pedagogical sites" advocated by Wilson (2005, 2007) as places within classrooms where children’s culture is welcomed and explored.