Biographical Research in Childhood Studies: Exploring Children’s Voices from a Pedagogical Perspective

Abstract

Current research on childhood insists on the need to listen to the children’s own voices. The line of research being pursued over the last 12 years by the Research Group on Pedagogy of Children’s Values (University Complutense of Madrid, Spain) has been sensitive to that issue. The rise of biographical research is set within what some authors call the “narrative turn” that has been taken in the knowledge of education. This turn has led to a rediscovery of the subjects’ own life experiences, in sharp contrast to the objectivist attempts of positivist methodologies in which the educator and the student are treated as replaceable representatives of some prototype. Thus, rather than being a specific research method, the narrative and biographical approach is considered in pedagogic circles as a paradigm. It is recognized as a new way of understanding education and pedagogical knowledge that fans out into different lines of research. Going on from our previous work on exploring children’s voices, our last study tries to delve deeper into the way children experience happiness.