Collaboration through cartoons: drawing cartoons to assist collaborative ethnography with young children

Representing participants’ perspectives faithfully is a fundamental principle for collaborative ethnography (Lassiter 2005). Collaboration is difficult to achieve, however, when the participants are young children who do not share a language with the researcher. This article presents an innovative methodological approach that was employed during a twelve month, ESRC funded research project that aimed to explore the communicative practices of young children in a super-diverse, early years educational environment. In addition to writing field notes, the researcher sketched cartoon strips of the events being observed and shared these with the children. The paper describes how the cartoons facilitated a more collaborative approach to ethnographic research as the children became engaged in their creation and interpretation. The findings suggest that cartoons provide an accessible medium that opens up spaces for developing dialogue around the research process. This has important implications for any research that endeavours to listen to the participants’ perspectives, but particularly where the participants are young children or in cases where the researcher does not speak the languages of the participants fluently