Impactful Ethnographies With Young Children About Play and Public Life: Being‐Learning‐Sharing‐Doing Young Children Co‐Led Research Praxis

Research which is co‐led by young children is an emerging field, yet there is a gap in how it can be understood in different geo‐political‐cultural‐economic contexts. This paper contributes to this gap of young children co‐led research by offering a re‐think through our proposed Being, Learning, Sharing, Doing (from now on BLSD) praxis, drawing on two contexts, Greece and Scotland. We propose that BLSD can offer a new way for re‐thinking and applying co‐led research with young children. This relational approach is grounded in reflexivity and embodied practices to conceptualise young children's rights to engagement, participation and processes of change/influence. The paper draws on our ethnographic, participatory, creative and play based, play cafe project, funded by the Froebel Trust, which explored 42 young children's and their families' experiences of play and public life. The project also involved a group of 19 young children advisors across the two countries. We argue that a BLSD praxis involves a reciprocal, relational and collaborative entanglement between young children and adult‐researchers‐parents/carers‐practitioners. The paper contributes to children co‐led research in two ways. First, by drawing on lessons from early childhood, it shifts the focus from normative ideas linked to co‐led children's research and children's participation that ‘children are experts in their own lives’ which perpetuate images of the individualist and autonomous participating child, to a more relational and entangled understanding of expertise, children's participation and ‘voice’, to include the vital role of important adults. Second, by focusing on research as praxis, which highlights the entangled nature of research‐practice, where young children and their communities were engaged intergenerationally in ‘life‐making’ and ‘worlding’ processes to create their own social just and play socio‐spatial alternatives.