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Drawing from the concepts of social constructionism, the article provides insights on how six purposively sampled Grade 6 vulnerable children, aged between 11-15, from povertystricken families, child-headed households and those allegedly orphaned by AIDS, resiliently navigated their schooling spaces and places in one rural, primary school in Swaziland. The article uses qualitative data from semi-structured individual and focus group interviews and a participatory research method, photovoice, to foreground narrative accounts of the vulnerable children's creative coping mechanisms aimed at overcoming the unfavourable circumstances of their schooling experiences. Despite facing some home-and school-based challenges, the vulnerable children were found to display deep-rooted resilience, with or without social support and aspiration for educational attainment, seen as a viable alternative for a better future. Creative coping mechanisms that vulnerable children adopted included calculated rebellion against abusive teachers and consignment to solitude or isolation when feeling overwhelmed by unpleasant experiences. It is recommended that support strategies should involve affirming vulnerable children's voice and resilience, drawing on how these children already creatively navigate their challenges.

This paper foregrounds vulnerable children as a social group whose experiences should be studied and understood from their own perspectives. The paper explores the real-life schooling experiences of six Grade 6 vulnerable children, aged between 11-15 years, in a rural primary school in the Lubombo region of Swaziland. Guided by a theoretical paradigm of social constructionism, the paper engages dynamics of children's vulnerability within this context, ravaged by poverty and HIV and AIDS. The aim is to contribute insights to our understanding on how we might improve vulnerable children's quality of schooling and educational experiences. A qualitative narrative approach was adopted, using semi-structured individual and focus group interviews and a participatory research method, photovoice, for data generation. The findings indicate that vulnerable children carried trauma caused by life experiences that affected their learning. They were also found to be lacking necessities like candles to help them with studying, and had additional family responsibilities that competed with their study time. Teachers' administration of corporal punishment was found to be inequitably skewed against vulnerable children, thereby exacerbating their schooling plight.

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This study explores Grade 4 school children’s experiences of cross-sex relationships in a co- educational farm school in uMgungundlovu district in South Africa. The aim is to understand if and how constructions of gender bear on young children’s social relations at the school. Informed by children’s geographies and new sociology of childhood studies, this study uses data from semi-structured interviews and photo-voice imagery based on a qualitative narrative study of three girls and three boys aged between 9 and 12 years. The study found that children’s experiences of cross-sex relationships were deeply entrenched in traditional discourses of masculinities and femininities. These rigidly constructed discourses of gender were found to constrain possibilities and fluidities with which children navigated places and spaces of cross- sex relationships in the school. The hegemonic regulatory power of gender norms was a yardstick, informing children’s organisation and performances of cross-sex relationships even if some children had developed creative ways of subverting dominant gender norms in how they navigated in cross-sex relationships. The study argues for the liberalisation of gender norms, in order to allow children to freely – without being constrained by their genitalia – take subject positions of gender in cross-sex relationships. This would promote sustainable equitable gender relations, as children learn how to engage in cross-sex relationships, beyond the constraining prescripts of dominant masculinities and femininities.