Tran N. Templeton

Tran N. Templeton:
I used photography in my dissertation because the work is in response to proliferating images of children online in schools, everywhere, images that are made, produced, and circulated by adults without children's input into them. So this work really is a natural response to those images because the photographs are made by children, and the way I see it is that the images that we produce and circulate about children are really a proxy for what we think about children and the stories that we tell about children that I think are very partial realities for children themselves.
My dissertation looks at the ways that young children represent themselves through photographs. This is really in response to the ways that young children are photographed by adults and the world around them without their say, without their ability to edit or delete. So I wanted to see how young children, very young children, ages two to five would represent themselves. What are the kinds of images they would take and what kinds of stories would they tell about their own lives?
So I discovered things that I did already know, except with more specificity. So the way that I think about young children is that they're already full complex human beings with their own desires, their own interests, their own fears, and that they're not a monolithic group. So the photographs that the children produce demonstrated how their lives and their images reflect their cultural upbringings, religion, race, ethnicity, gender. So instead of thinking of kids as sort of these empty blank slates, empty vessels, blank slates, children were showing me that they really reflect their cultural identities.
I would say that my dissertation looks quite traditional. It takes the form of a manuscript, so it includes narratives about the children. It has the typical structure of an introduction statement of the problem, a literature review methodology, and then when we get into the findings, that includes the children's images, and each chapter takes a different approach at looking at childhood. So one chapter is looking at the spaces and places of childhood. Another chapter looks at the objects that children are engaged with in their day-to-day lives. Another are the kinds of relationships that children foster and are nurtured by. So it's looking at different axes of children's lives in a written and photographic format. So the photos are all made by the children. Other things that I've produced from the dissertation, my presentations, articles try to tell stories with the children's images and their narratives, so they might look and feel different.
Getting to the different forms of the work, I think, involved looking closely at the photographs. So would be, what are the photographs showing us? Are they showing us images of, for example, the city in which children traverse? So one of the things that I did was I would take photographs and place them in our tiny little apartment, just arranging them spatially and, as much as I could, temporarily, to see, to get a sense of life from children's perspectives. So arranging the images and then making a video of the images, I can't fully inhabit the life of a child, but I can at least attempt to, through just trying to play with the photos in different ways. So tracing is another way of trying to get closer to the photographs.
So I would say, just to get back at your question of how I develop these different modes of working with the images, it was really looking closely. It was listening to the images by interacting with them in ways that are not just looking. Photographs we typically think of are objects we're looking at, but I think photographs can also be objects that we play with materially, that we inhabit imaginatively and creatively. So looking in much closer ways allows me to develop other ways of thinking with the images.
One of the things that's really, really important for me is, and in a way paralyzes me, is how do I tell a child's story in a way that's true to what's the story that they want me to tell potentially, and how do I tell it in a way that actually allows people to see two-year-olds as really complex, as really intellectual as interesting? I think when people listen to these stories, they hardly think of these children as two. They really think of them as older, and so it's honoring their utterances as more than just utterances. It's actually full narratives.
I take a lot of pride in the presentations that I give about children because I'm trying to use the Google Slides and its effects in a way that actually slows down our sense of time in the way that children slow down our sense of time. So I think it's just playing with the capacities of the tool that I'm working with to be able to tell this story, whether it's making a video, making a presentation, or doing something else.
When I'm working with children and their photographs, I do try, as much as possible, to include them in the process of analysis. Children don't always want to engage in that, and that's part of respecting children as researchers too, understanding where, when, and how they might want to enter into the space. So there are children who have analyzed, actually coded. Sarah Yu is a child that I think about. She's a child that's actually coded images with me where we're sorting the images together. I have had children who I've tried to create videos and books, for who they appreciated, I think. They say, "Thank you, but I'd like to move on with my life now and go play." And I think that's great for me to be able to see that what children value isn't always what I value and what researchers value. We have all this... We talk a lot about reliability and validity and member checking, and I was trying to subscribe to all those things as a doctoral researcher, but realizing that children's ideas of member checking, validity, and reliability are very different.
I had always been a teacher who took photographs. I took quite a lot of photographs, and I love looking at photographs. I've always been inclined towards the visual. But as a teacher, I was constantly photographing and video recording the students. I often spent time after work just watching and looking again at photos and videos, never really quite put together that all of those photos and videos were created by me. So they were always from my perspective. It was always from the teacher's perspective, really.
I took a course with Wendy Luttrell at CUNY Grad Center in 2013, and in that course we worked with images that she had created or that children in her work had created. They were 8 to 10 at first, and then she worked with them later. It just got me to think about, well, if she can do this work with older children, why wouldn't I be able to do this work with young children? And I think that speaks to how I think about young children.
Can I say that I was fully confident that I wouldn't understand what they would produce? No. Right before the dissertation, the actual methods in the data collection, I was quite worried that I wouldn't understand what an image meant. There are still images that I don't fully know the story behind, and I probably never will. So I decided to partake in this methodology because I wanted to see how it could help me get closer to children and children's perspectives. It did and did in a way that even as a teacher who spends a lot of time observing and a lot of time thinking about children, the images show me something different because they're from children's perspective. I can't deny that children have made these images and that they're telling those stories.
I chanced upon this mode of inquiry-tracing by playing around with an iPad and an application. I think it's called Paper. I might have a number to it too, but I chanced on this by just playing around with photographs that the children in my study had taken. I placed the photos in the application and started tracing over them. As I was tracing, I noticed aspects of the images I had never ever noticed before, namely people in the photos that were important to the child that I had actually not realized, and that once I realized who was in an image or what was in an image, I could piece together other aspects of this child that I hadn't fully realized before by piecing those aspects of those images together with narratives that the child had shared maybe even a month prior.
So something about working with two- to five-year-olds is that you're actually piecing together narrative fragments that occur over long periods of time. Something comes up one day that doesn't come up again for another three and a half weeks, and my job as a researcher is to be able to piece those together. So tracing allowed me to grasp another aspect of that child's life and their visual perspective.
I will also say that it was inspired by one of my colleagues, Victoria Restler. She was at CUNY Grad Center. Now she's at Rhode Island College. Victoria was working with teachers and activist teachers, actually. She was working with some of their video footage of them talking about what it meant to be a teacher in a classroom at a time when neoliberal standards were really imposing certain ideas of measurement and standardization on youth. So she started doing tracing. She was tracing over their lips, so it was slightly different. She was also doing some work in classrooms and rubbing materials to get a sense of the materiality of the materials. It's a little different, but it was still inspired by her.
A challenge of working with children's photographs is not quite knowing what the image is doing, how it's working, or what it's showing us. That was a major anxiety of embarking on this research. While I believe that 2, 3, 4 year olds have a lot to say, I wasn't always sure that I was equipped to be able to understand what they were saying, especially through a mode like a photograph taken on their terms. So that, I would say, was a big challenge of just being able to know that the research process would take care of that.
I think photographs are personal objects. They're both personal, and they can also be political. So having a child give you a photograph they've taken requires a certain sensibility from me to step outside of my adult ways of looking and into children's ways of looking as much as possible. Whether it's a photograph made by an adult or a child, it always involves some degree of some subjectivity that I am looking from my own perspective, and I think I'm challenged by how do I put that aside, if I even put that aside, in order to be able to grasp what the child is putting out there. The most important thing for me is to tell stories that children would say, "Yes, that's my story."
The advice that I would want to give students who want to engage in multimodal research is to really think about the purpose of it. Why are you choosing this mode or these modes? For whose benefit and what service are you engaging with these modes for your research? I think that there's a lot of value in experimenting with modes, but I also worry that sometimes it moves us away from what our participants want from this work. So I think, for me, that's the most important thing.
So I think about Victoria Restler, who is a youth studies professor at Rhode Island College, who works with collaging and other experimental forms of art in her work. I also work closely with Vivek Vellanki, who is at Indiana University, and he does work with photos as well. He works with youth and photography, and he's also put together exhibitions of passport photos, for example, as a way to help people think about the kinds of images that we live with that are day-to-day images that actually hold a lot of meaning for others. He's also done work with taking images of refugees and immigrants belongings. They're curating it, and he's photographing those, another way to get at somebody else's perspectives on their own lives and what's important to them. When you look at my work, hopefully you're seeing the creator, the real creator, as the child and not me, who's just trying to translate it.
Once I finished this dissertation, I did do an iteration of this study again in Texas in 2019, when I lived there. That was really important for me to do as a way to see how I could do this work in a classroom with children that I didn't know as well, because my dissertation was actually done at a site that I was very familiar with, and I had actually been a teacher there, and some of the children, I had been their caregiver, their teacher, or a nanny since they were babies. So in a way, that made it difficult, but it also made it easier to develop relationships with the children and their families.
So I wanted to try this methodology again in Texas, within a classroom of children I didn't know very well. So I did that. I'm actually still in the process of analyzing a lot of that data. I've just written something on a photograph of a toilet and a photograph of poop inside the toilet. That was a really important piece for me to write because it wasn't just a photograph of a toilet, and it just wasn't a photograph of poop. It was actually a photograph of competence in the face of an administration that did not see this child as competent. That's an example of how a child's image actually is so much more than what we see at face value.
So I'm still working on the analysis of those images. I would like to try to think about this methodology with my next line of research, which is having to do with children in their animal relations, their non-human animal relations. So I'm trying to think about how can I still use images. Again, this gets at the whole idea of, is an image actually the right mode for this particular... The next research? But it is something that... So it's tricky. I really want to work with images. I want to continue working with images as long as I possibly can, until I'm bored with it, I guess. But I also want to make sure that it aligns up with the ideas that I'm trying to grapple with.
The data management of a multimodal project, which I did not mention in the panel, I don't think, is overwhelming. So I have images in photo albums at my house. There's also the preschool room, where the work took place in 2016. I also gifted them with photo albums of the children's images. The children also received a set of their own images, digitally and print-wise. Also, my dissertation committee members, they each got a framed image of one of the kids. But I am still trying to figure out what to do with all the images. I guess I don't think that everything needs to be done with... Something needs to be done with everything. So that's something for me to think about.