Street Children´s Narrative Accounts: Availability, Access, and Transposition

Abstract

In this paper we report on the results of a workshop that we conducted collaboratively with our team, a group of volunteers and other teachers that support street children and their families living in very difficult situations, in 2015 in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The main goal of the workshop was to provide children and youth with opportunities to expand on their narrative capacities, using visual arts as one of the preferred media. After presenting the context, we focus on the relation between visual, visible, and virtual (Cambré, 2018) in their pedagogical significance. Our outcomes show that facilitating access to a variety of resources, in different interactional configurations and with diverse media, enables participants to find a voice of their own and express themselves as individuals, and, simultaneously, enable children as a group to express as a collective. We argue that our methodology allows to identify the kinds of learning opportunities for narrative accounts that become available when interpreting children-adult and children-children interactions as constantly unfolding in a web of significance, provided by an array of multi-mediated material (i.e., multi-mediated interactions, that is, mediated through oral exchange, visual arts, photography, video and written text). We conclude that these kinds of pedagogical experiences set out an educational potential for narration and self-expression while supporting a way by which children may be able to state their position vis a vis devastating living conditions that affect them.