The master’s thesis is a result of an ethnographic fieldwork with children between 3 and 6 years of age. The author grounds her work on the premise of children as active (co)contributors of their development and as such able (and compelled) to participate in shaping their lives and expressing their thoughts, feelings and ideas. Anthropology, childhood anthropology specifically, provides us with an important contribution in understanding the child. Through research on and with children, various authors have shown that to understand the society as a whole, we need to account for and understand child’s perspective. Even though childhood is a period of constant change and transitions, the children still can offer valuable insights in our understanding of the world around us. In her work, the author employs the pedagogy of listening to gain in-depth understanding of the child. In the framework of the pedagogy of listening the child is a resourceful and capable being able to establish meanings and understand the surroundings through a constant process of knowledge, identity and value formation. Ethnographic fieldwork presented in the thesis consists of observation with intervention and participatory photography, substantiated by in-depth individual interviews. Participatory photography is a method that engages children in sharing their experiences and views using photography. The research was undertaken in a Montessori kindergarten environment where the author is working as a teacher of the participating children.
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