This paper will discuss ethnographic research practices, which open possibilities to counteract the adult- child in the context of school research. It will argue that the adult - child binary is so much taken for granted, that it is almost impossible to analytically understand how it is enacted and even harder to engage in resisting it. By drawing on our own research practice we would to make the point that critical ethnography has a twofold potential: If practiced as a diffractive (rather than reflective) approach, the practice of ethnography illuminates how the adult -child binary is enacted, normalised and moralized. Ethnographic school research in this vein has the potential to counteract a tendency of school research to take the adult- child binary for granted without getting any insight into how it structures/ normalizes/ standardizes children's learning. By searching for ways which allow the ethnographer not take the adult child binary for granted, critical ethnography may not only find ways of resisting to take control over children and children's complicity for granted, but also opens new perspectives on children's learning

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