Performative Drawing Events with Young Children − Implications for the Researcher’s Role

This methodological article explores a performative drawing event as an approach to eliciting children’s perspectives and its implications for the researcher’s role. The approach seeks to make children’s perspectives visible as they emerge through relations, play, movement and imagination. Findings show that children’s embodied and sensory engagement is central to meaning-making, where drawing and storytelling function as both expression and interaction. The researcher’s role is framed as ethically and methodologically responsible, requiring attentive listening, acting as a ‘bridge keeper’ between children’s expressions and interpretation. Building on the key analytical moments, the study highlights that drawing and narrative modalities align closely with children’s expression, that equal participation across roles is required and that bodily and arts-based expression is a precondition for meaning-making. Overall, the study emphasises children’s agency and artistic and embodied forms of expression as key to nuanced understanding, and the importance of prioritising children’s perspectives in research and practice.