Chapter 5: COVID-19 and Young Children’s Well-being: Creative Methodologies and Children’s Perspectives

This chapter addresses children’s perspectives of the global COVID-19 pandemic, and an Early Childhood Education for sustainability lens has been used to navigate emotional obstacle courses (O’Gorman, 2020) with explicit methodologies employed to make children’s voices visible.

This research was inspired by protocols produced by Engdahl and Pramling Samuelsson (2022) with visual elicitation of the coronavirus and the shared reading of a story with a COVID-19 mask as protagonist. Informal conversations between early childhood practitioners, teachers and children produced qualitative data, and Deleuzian concepts were employed with dialogue between adults and children and peer-to-peer. Through dialogue, existing thoughts about the COVID-19 pandemic were reframed with new knowledge to support children to express their opinions and problem-solve with their own responses, which were sometimes framed as probable improbabilities (Chukovsky, 1975). Here, children showed an interest in the topsy turvy world of the pandemic and used imaginary worlds to interpret their lived realities. This chapter contributes to the ongoing debate about children’s rights and participation and extends a rights-based discourse to support children’s health and well-being.