Creatively researching children’s narratives through images and drawings

Abstract

This chapter illustrates how the creation of visual images, such as drawings, collages and posters by children and young people, can lead to rich individual and collective narratives that enhance differing approaches to research. The studies discussed provide an entrée to how metaphors, stories and narratives of children's experience are made more readily accessible by the use of visual imagemaking than by alternative, verbally-oriented methods of investigation. The premise of the chapter is that drawings, sensitively used with children in research, have potential for helping them to narrate aspects of their consciously lived experience as well as uncovering the unrecognized, unacknowledged or 'unsayable' stories that they hold. These stories focus on broader political and social issues affecting their lives as well as the more personal, private and emotional ones.