Building a method for researching attribution of meaning by children aged 5 to 6 in school

Abstract

This article reports on the first phase of a research project in which we looked for the voices of young children, aged 5 to 6, in school. What do children experience in school? What do they see as the meaning of school? What is their motivation? Children have the right to be listened to. The question is which settings, under which circumstances, are appropriate to hear the voice of young children, taking into account that the perspective of young children and the way in which they express their views is multiple and changeable? Children can't be excluded from context; they are determined by it and influence the context as well. In our research project we studied literature looking for the essentials of the concept of voice and attribution of meaning by young children, and for indications to describe indicators of these concepts. We started our research project by testing settings and methods of collecting data, mostly based on the grounded theory approach, to see if we could connect our findings with the formulated indicators of the concept of voice and attribution of meaning by young children.