Rhizomatically researching with young children
identify artefacts that obviously matter to them personally, rather than other children’s activity; they seemed to be using the video camera to take pictures not action movies. Some of them did, however, video children playing. Brett could focus the camera in one place for relatively long lengths of time, spending five minutes seated on a strategically placed bench recording two girls on the swings and three minutes videoing boys making chocolate pies in the sandpit, moving on only when he was being splashed with sandy water. Anna, Ani, Cassie, Eve and Zoe captured the activity of children with whom they often played, taking turns to video each other. Although Fleur held the camera, Maria led the way through various indoor play spaces. How the children operated here is similar to Dockett and Perry’s (2003) research, which highlights children’s capabilities in communicating their insights about their educational experiences, particularly when in charge of the technology. However, the children’s video recordings of my research capture much activity beyond their immediate focus, activity that enriches the understandings of the complexity of children’s play(ing). On reflection, my expectations for the children to video the activity of others involved in games was overly ambitious. I was expecting them to step aside from their usual interactions, to distance themselves on the other side of the lens, to disturb the embodied nature of their play(ing) and interacting with the children around them. I was imposing my adult-centric way of operating in a research world on their childhood understandings of their worlds of curricular performativity. Even though I had recognised the difficulties (or impossibility?) of being on both sides of the camera, I was expecting that somehow they could be. But they did not pretend it was possible to be both camera operator/movie maker and player. However, I do wonder what might be possible over time if children had ready access to a video camera and a television through which to play their recordings of their play(ing). A review of their recordings suggests they needed considerably more time to work through the excitement of using the technology before engaging with a more creative use of the camera.
reflecting on the videoing process Having generated the data of my research project, I happen upon Walsh, Bakir, Lee, Chung, Chung and Colleague’s (2007) writing about their experiences of using video in research with children. Nevertheless, this is useful, as I write about, and continue to reflect on the process now. As St.Pierre says of writing her doctoral thesis: ‘This text appears to represent the real, but this inscription is a simulacrum, today’s story, and the following attempt to unfold the methodological processes of this project is limited and partial and a bit absurd, like all attempts to capture the real’ (St.Pierre, 1997b, p. 180, italics added). In this moment it certainly feels, as St.Pierre recognises, 173