Learning to Listen: Exploring the Idioms of Childhood

Abstract

How do we recognise children's participation and their relationships to public life? Drawing on evidence from ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2014-2016 for the ERC funded Connectors Study on the relationship between childhood and public life, this paper explores the ways in which children communicate their encounters with public life. Τhe contemporary phenomenon of listening without hearing is discussed as this relates to the call for listening to children and the simultaneous failure to hear what they say. Idioms are introduced as an 'instrument' for thinking through what it means and feels like to encounter and make sense of childhood and children's practices of relating to public life. The analysis focuses on three emblematic encounters with six-to eight-year-old children living in Athens, Hyderabad, London. We argue that dominant understandings of listening to children rely heavily on cognitive, conceptual and rational models of idealised and largely verbal forms of communication that ignore the affective, embodied and lived dimensions of making meaning. Through ethnographic thick description we trouble what it means to tune into children's worlds and to 'properly hear', and in so doing demonstrate the ways in which idioms support an understanding of what matters to children. Drawing on evidence from ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2014-2016 for the ERC funded Connectors Study on childhood and public life, this paper develops the concept of idioms as an 'tuning device' for understanding children's cultures and their communication therein, as meaningful and agentic. The term idiom, as used in anthropological and other social science literatures, provides an understanding of the act of communication that goes beyond linguistics and spoken language. It shifts attention towards communication as a social, cultural, temporal, as well as fully sensory act, that includes gestures, practices, actions, and affect. As such, idioms are a way of world-making and this paper focuses specifically on those idioms that were mobilised by children to make sense of and communicate their encounters with and experiences of public life. Children in the study understood public life as activities, places, and things that were accessible, communal, civil and political, known and open (e.g. a range of institutions, parks, toilets, voting, etc). A number of children also commented on the difficulty, also found in the literature, of providing a definition of public life (e.g. 'I don't know how to describe what I know aboutit'). In the social science literature and in practice, such encounters and experiences are often referred to as children's participation and much has been made in theory and in practice of 'listening to children' as a medium for participation. While the failure to listen is systemic and often political, we argue that useful sensitising devices (concepts used to think and act with), such as we have found idioms to be, can support theory and practice development that better resonates with everyday childh...

Thinking with feeling: Children’s emotional orientations to public life

“…Furthermore, the analysis is a response to recent critiques on the normative, idealised form of children’s participatory discourse, which prioritises children’s ‘voice’ over other modes of communication. As we (Nolas and Varvantakis, 2019, in press; Nolas et al, 2019) and others (Kraftl, 2013; Spyrou, 2011; Wyness, 2013) have argued restricting our attention to children’s verbal articulations alone is not enough. Children express themselves idiomatically (Nolas et al, 2019) drawing on a range of auditory, sensory, visual registers.…”

Metaphors we experiment with in multimodal ethnography

“…The Connectors Study methodology embraces pluralistic forms of everyday communication, both planned and emergent. For example, our practices of data collection have involved time hanging out with children and their families, taking photographs, walking around children's neighbourhoods, drawing maps of significant relationships and places, and talking, as we have discussed elsewhere (Nolas, Aruldoss, & Varvantakis, 2018;. Some of the methods used have only recently come to the fore in social science research (e.g.…”

The Politics of Young Children through the ‘Epistemologies of the South’

“…Recent childhood literatures show that children can do politics in diverse and idiomatic ways, differently from adultist envisioning (Hakli and Kallio 2014;Hakli 2011, 2013;Nolas et al 2018a). Bartos (2012) for example demonstrates how care as a political concept signifies children's relationship to the world.…”

“…These examples together indicate that children are capable of doing politics in different ways but, as Skelton (2013) cautions us: 'unless we pay attention to their ways and means, their strategies and tactics, we miss and misunderstand important political process' (p. 126). So, there is a need for childhood scholars to tune into childrens' world to understand their political experiences better (Nolas et al 2018a).…”