Photo-production during research processes with children: free expression and participatory possibilities through photovoice.

Children's lives, what children are and should be, are often reconstructed through adult interpretations (Mayall, 1994), making children objects of research processes (Alderson, 2005): this reflects childhood images that considers them as incomplete subjects subordinate to adults (James, Prout, 1990). Recently, we are gradually observing a paradigm shift that is having implications in research through the implementation of methods capable of enhancing children's voice, supporting their expressive and participatory potential: this represents a change in children’s position, understood as competent agents who have something to say. In this perspective, visual participatory methods value children's unique ways of seeing reality (Burke, 2005) through child-friendly language (Shaw, 2021) and empowerment processes. The paper reflects around photo-production during an exploratory research conducted in two Milan preschools, using photovoice methodology (Wang, Burris, 1997): previous empirical researches highlighted that adults play a crucial role during the research process due to the potential power dynamics (Devine, 2013; Morrow, 2003) and the risk of more or less consciously influencing children's responses. So, compared to traditional research processes with interviews, these dynamics are subverted with photovoice: field collected observations show that the concrete action of pictures’ creation permits child involvement as active participants (Samanova et al., 2022), allowing them to express themselves beyond external constraints (Butschi, Hedderich, 2021) through the self- production of the favorite snapshots. This action is less affected by adult influence, which enables personal activation through concrete production of subjective meanings. In conclusion, the immediacy, the freedom and the possibility for creative actions during the photo-production in photovoice, allows preschoolers to express themselves freely and more independently than during interviews, thus supporting agency and self-expression in an engaging process.