JOHN PARRY

In-the-Picture is a way of listening to and engaging with very young children and trying to understand their day-to-day experiences.

 

JONTY RIX

In-the-Picture draws upon the idea of listening to children, which sees learning as a collaborative process between adults and children.

 

JOHN PARRY

In-the-Picture uses first-person narrative, in an attempt for the observer to become a more effective and attentive listener. It uses photography in an attempt to capture the child’s focus of interest and attention. It involves sharing the photographs taken with the child soon after the observations. And it also involves discussions with the practitioners and the family after these observation sessions.

 

JONTY RIX

In-the-Picture has a sociocultural understanding of learning. Children are seen as having ownership of their time and their activities and of the space. Children are seen as competent. And understanding children’s experiences requires their participation and for us to engage with their ‘voice’.

 

JOHN PARRY

In-the-Picture involves four perspectives: first-person narrative observations; photographs of children’s focus of interest; sharing the photographs with the child; and then reflecting on the observations and the photographs with the people involved in the session.

 

JONTY RIX

The four perspectives of In-the-Picture can be used flexibly to respond to the needs of those people who are using it. But let’s start off by thinking about the first-person narrative, here’s an example from one of the early research projects. It’s during a speech and language session, with a lot of people sat around the table, and there’s a focus upon one young lad who is about two years old. Now this isn’t claiming to be exactly his experience, but this is how the first-person narrative observation went.

 

“Now the woman has a box and opens it, and there are bells, and it’s in front of me, and I’m not sure I’m allowed to take this, and mum helps me, and I take some, and now the woman is shaking, and they’re telling me to shake, and then the woman is doing it, and I am looking but they’re making me shake, so I feel the shake around with my hands, and then they tell me to stop. I start shaking but mum stops me. Now the woman is looking at me, telling me it is my turn and I stop. She shakes and asks me to copy. I do, then they make me shake. They shake my hand and tell me ‘well done’. They keep saying ‘Samuel’s turn’, and the boy is shaking so I shake, and I look at gran and shake, and they say ‘it’s not my turn’, and then everyone is shaking, and I look at them and they tell me to shake so I do, and they say ‘well done’, and then they say ‘stop’. And they’re making me put them in the box. I don’t want to. Mum makes me do it. They say ‘well done, good boy.’”

 

And so when you read that observation it becomes quite clear that what’s happening for that young child is every time that they tell him to start he stops, and every time they tell him to stop he starts. And he gets told well done when he’s done something wrong. So it’s almost like it’s completely affirming the wrong things, not the things that the speech and language therapists and the other adults involved might think that they’re seeking to achieve. So we then popped next door and this next observation happened about 15 minutes later.

 

“We’re back in this room, here are the shapes. I’m sitting on the floor, I’m banging the shapes. They make a good noise, I bang them together, and the man is helping me put some shapes back in the block. We put one in, two in and then I’m banging, and so is he, and when I stop he stops, and this is fun and we do it again, and again, and again. When I stop he stops, and he says ‘stop’ and when I go he says ‘go’, louder and quieter, and faster, and slower, and harder, and softer, and he does the same as me, makes me laugh, and then I drop the brick behind me and the man finds it. It’s in the books, so then I pull the book out. I put the book back and we start banging again, and I swap brick shapes and so does he, and we’re banging again, and he says ‘go’ when I go, and stop and I stop, and I do a very long bang, and he asks if I’m going to stop, and I do stop very quickly and look at him, and he stopped and that is fun.”

 

And yet 15 minutes later in an observation where there are just two people playing, the thing that they were trying to achieve in the earlier session but were failing to do was achieved through play in the session next door.

 

JOHN PARRY

Another example comes from the study that involved looking at young children’s friendships in their pre-schools. And this example of a first-person narrative looks at the sophistication of the interactions he was having with the children around him, interactions that the practitioners didn’t necessarily think of until they stepped back and looked at some of the first-person narrative observations that were taken.

 

“The boy looks at my train, points at it and I look up. The boy comes over to look at my train and I look at him. Then he goes back to the other train. The boy goes back to the farmyard box. I put my hand in and he looks at me. I take my hand out and then go back to the train box.”

 

And another example, a similar sort of thing but this time with a young boy called Sam. And Sam actually is using his toys to draw in new friends, and this was a sophisticated way that he used to gain the sort of interest and also to explore the interest of the other children in his play. I’ll read this one.

 

“I pick up some more discs and throw them on the floor. A girl comes. She throws me the discs that I’ve got. Waves it around and throws, she throws it as well. I go back to get another disc. I’m looking behind the trolley, there’s some more discs. I get it and I bring it back. A boy picks up the disc and throws it. I pick up another disc and throw it in the air. I put the discs on the floor.”

 

JONTY RIX

So let’s move on to thinking about the photographs of the child’s focus. These are images of the things that the child is looking at, is interested in, is playing with, and they’re taken, they can be taken as the child is playing, or they can be taken before, or they can be taken afterwards. And the kinds of images that we took for example in the first research project were things such as a ball pit; bells; a book; building bricks; a drawing pad or a frog; a pair of boots; a child hiding under a blanket; a horse puzzle; picture of lemons from a book; a pop-up game; or a pot with a lid. We went to a sensory room, so it was with the sensory wall and the switches, or a photograph of the xylophone. So these are examples that might have been taken during a session with one child.

 

JOHN PARRY

And in the study that involved looking at children’s friendships, the photographs were taken not necessarily of toys or objects, sometimes they were but not often, usually they were taken of the children, the person we were focusing on was playing with more often. The third perspective of In-the-Picture is actually sharing these photographs then with the child that you’ve been observing. And in the friendship study, this sharing revealed interesting things, because the children came back to photos that were important to them. I can recollect Dan, who’s first-person narrative I read earlier, a picture that he kept coming back to was not only one of his favourite activity, which was painting the playground floor with water from a dish, he pretended to be a painter doing this, but his favourite photo that he kept coming back to when we showed it to him was not only that activity, it was him doing it with the person he liked doing it most, his other friend in the nursery.

 

JONTY RIX

And earlier when we were looking at the photograph of the child’s focus, we had a range of images that you saw that were taken in that first study. But out of that range of images the one that the child focused on particularly was the dad’s boots. And so it became possible to think we need to talk a little bit more about the way in which we could work with dad’s boots.

 

JOHN PARRY

The fourth perspective of In-the-Picture is the reflective discussion, a really important element. This is when the people involved, the observer, the family, the practitioners, look at the photographs, look at the observations and think what they mean. What do they tell us about this child’s experiences here? What can we understand more about this? An example from the friendship study was that there was a picture that the child kept returning to which was an outdoor play activity with some connect, and there was one girl that was always in this picture that the child’s, which was the child’s favourite. And when, as part of the reflective discussion with the practitioners and the child’s mum, we were talking about this photograph and exploring why this was so important, it was revealed then that this little girl was actually a friend from outside the nursery and was someone that he depended on spontaneously within the group to support him during his day.

 

JONTY RIX

Another interesting example took place across the five months of observations, where the father was trying to stop the child from throwing, because there was a fear that the child might throw something and hurt his sister; however, looking through the observations across that five-month period, we identified 26 different reasons that the child will have experienced throwing. So throwing as something about discovery, throwing as something you can control, throwing as part of a story or as a means of expressing emotion, throwing as a challenge, throwing as a way to fill a box - the list went on and only one of them was throwing is something that can hurt people. And actually what the dad was trying to teach the child was that they had to be careful when they throw. And it made, the discussion meant that the father reconsidered both the rules that he was putting in place around throwing and also how to achieve the thing that he wanted to achieve.

 

So we’ve considered the four different perspectives of In-the-Picture, and you’ve got some insight into the way that people might do first-person narratives and take the photographs and share those photographs and have reflective discussions, but these four perspectives can be used in flexible ways. And that’s what we’re going to go on to explore in this course now: the flexibility that’s at the heart of In-the-Picture.

 

END OF RECORDING