Multivoiced research with children: Exploring methodological issues in children's documentation of school projects

In educational sciences, the gathering of video diaries as a form of "student standpoint research" has become increasingly important, and critical developments in educational ethnography support participatory frameworks of ethnographic research projects. Legitimizing research subjects' voices through their own data collection corresponds to ethical demands of democratic, dialogical, multivoiced research. In this chapter, we combine perspectives from two different research projects in primary schools in Luxembourg to shed light on the methodological and practical underpinnings of collectively gathered audio-visual ethnographic data. Drawing on video data collected by children in schools, we consider ways in which children’s documentation of their school experiences allows for dynamic approaches to space, context, time, reality and identity. As we analyze the coherence between this kind of multiperspectival data and the demands of ethnographic research we seek to demonstrate the extents to which such methods allow for an interpretation of institutionally embedded, highly performative and individualised data authored by the children themselves.