This peer-reviewed article about child participation and IGL has been published online in the journal European Early Childhood Education Research Journal on 6 August 2025. It is an Open Access article so free to read in its complete form.
Educators as enablers of young children’s voice and agency in research: messages from an Irish study on Intergenerational Learning.
Abstract
This article reports on one element of a study of intergenerational learning as a pedagogical strategy for young children: the key role of early childhood educators as researchers in generating the perspectives of young children’s experiences of intergenerational learning in care homes and day centres. The researcher collaborated with educators in Irish ECE services to agree guidelines for the data-gathering process. Educators gathered data with 70 children, using two main strategies, ‘draw-and-talk’ and ‘talk-and-listen’, strategies widely used in the services and acknowledged methodologies by the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child. Thematic analysis facilitated a bottom-up analytical process, allowing unexpected meanings to be identified. Key findings included the importance of educators’ belief in children having a democratic right to and competence in co-constructing meaning in their lives; the value added to the research of educators’ knowledge of the child and their contexts; the additional layer of meaning added through parents’ contributions, and educators’ expertise in scaffolding children through the research process using multimodal approaches. These findings point to the strengths of positioning children as central in knowledge production and educators as skilled researchers tapping into the potential of both to enhance the lives of children in ECE services.
Read or download the article here on the Journal’s website.
