Reconceptualising Agency and Childhood: New perspectives in childhood studies by Florian Esser & Meike S. Baader & Tanja Betz & Beatrice Hungerland

Author:Florian Esser & Meike S. Baader & Tanja Betz & Beatrice Hungerland [Esser]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781317524403
Publisher: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2015-02-07T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 10

Martha Muchow’s research on children’s life space

A classic study on childhood in the light of the present

Günter Mey

In the scope of Childhood Studies, the methodological claim will be made here that childhood research is not research about children so much as research from the point of view of children. This contribution connects these considerations to certain issues of developmental research by discussing the study “The Life Space of the Urban Child” conducted by Martha Muchow in the 1920s to 1930s. Muchow’s innovative design of combining various methods (e.g. cartography, interviews, essay writing and various observations) is an outstanding example of how studies can be conducted in such a way as to obtain a complete picture of a complex psychological phenomenon, to the extent that these various methods provide different perspectives of the topic at hand. Going beyond the question of how we collect data, Muchow also stressed that research into children must involve a specific adult (researcher) and a specific child and that a simplistic view of children needs to be overcome. Taking this into account, this contribution discusses the premise that it is easy to make statements about seeing the world through their eyes, but that we have to recognise the differences between how adults and children perceive things. In particular, the point is stressed regarding how far statements made by adults about children can be seen as statements of a child’s point of view. In contrast to widely used models, which either reconstruct childhood from the adults’ points of view or against the background of the individual’s own childhood memory, this contribution argues for consequently considering childhood as a construction created by different generational constellations.

Introduction

In recent years, it has become almost self-evident to research explicitly into the child’s perspective rather than researching about children. This shift in research direction has established itself particularly in the context that emerged in Great Britain and Scandinavia in the mid-1980s with the involvement of Sociology and Education Studies under the label of “Childhood Studies”, which then, in the 1990s, extended to many other countries (James et al., 1998; Corsaro, 2005; Qvortrup et al., 2011; Woodhead & Montgomery, 2003).

Developmental Psychology was not immediately involved in the formation of Childhood Studies, and indeed there were initially strong critiques of (mainstream) Developmental Psychology (e.g. Mayall, 1996; Burman, 2005) from within Childhood Studies. Nevertheless, conceptualisations from within Developmental Psychology did provide a productive series of points of contact to the research direction of Childhood Studies. This is particularly true since the traditional conceptualisation of development and its grounding in an exclusively biological idea of maturity has become less popular within mainstream Developmental Psychology itself. This has been the case for a long time in critical Developmental Psychology or discursive Developmental Psychology, or more generally in cultural Developmental Psychology – even in this area of the discipline the focus is now placed on the idea that children are (self-)effective and capable of agency.

In the course of this review, older studies from the early phase of Developmental

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