Understanding and working with ethical issues when including young children in educational research is critical to ensuring their involvement is meaningful. Increasingly, different methodological approaches have been used to address some of these issues, and the use of visual methods is showing particular potential for its age appropriateness. This paper will specifically focus on three examples of drawing based visual method used with samples of children across compulsory school age from the Learning to Learn in Schools project: Pupil View Templates (n=263, age range 4–12 years), cartoon storyboards (n=210, age range 4-16 years) and fortune lines (n= 69, 4–14 years). The discussion of each method will be framed from a pragmatic perspective and will particularly focus on the ethics of process and output, how the method was used and the data that were analysed. Questions will be asked about the considerations that need to be made when including young children in data sets with other older school-aged children and dilemmas identified: the affordances and constraints of visual approaches for all participants, the role of the visual as mediator, the role and positioning of the adult support and the impact this has on the nature of the data elicited. 

I will explore ethics from the perspective of an emancipatory and democratic researcher.  This was inherent in the Learning to Learn in Schools project from which the examples are drawn (Higgins et al. 2007; Wall et al. 2010; Wall 2012) and as such guided the data collection, synthesis and analysis process. Traditional research ethics, as covered by the guidelines produced by key educational research organisations (for example, BERA 2011; AERA 2011) are relevant. Even so, it is worth noting that neither mention the specific field of visual methodology or issues associated with researching young children. There are ethical principals explicitly associated with involving children in research (Graham et al. 2015), but the ethical process (te Riele and Baker 2015), however, of how we engaged with these samples of children and the visual data that we took forward in our enquiries was more nuanced. The way we included young children and their views in the research samples, must go beyond accountability and safe guarding to fulfill an agenda that is much more wide reaching and aligned with the UNCRC (1989) and democratic principles (Pope et al. 2010). The exploration of the ethics of process and output as presented in this paper will enable a range of ethical dilemmas to be identified and discussed. 

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