Autistic children have not always been conceptualised as rights-bearing citizens in research. Historically they were thought of as deficient and incapable of meaningfully contributing to research that was conducted on them. This misconception still continues to affect many autistic children today. Both the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD) both acknowledge disabled children as having inalienable rights – the right to express their views and be heard, and the right to have those views taken seriously amongst them (United Nations, 1990; United Nations, 2006). How we might better realise and advocate for the right of autistic children to actively participate in research that calls forth rather than marginalises their hundred languages of meaning making (Edwards, Gandini & Forman, 2011) is therefore a crucially important conversation to be having in the forum of ECER2019 as we consider challenges, possibilities and future directions for children’s rights research in education in an era of uncertainty.

This paper is drawn from the findings of my PhD research, which focuses on sensory environments in early childhood settings and how these produce the active participation and learning of autistic children. My research questions included exploring what sensory environments were, how sensory environments produced the active participation and learning of autistic children, and also how sensory environments produced and supported autistic children to realise competent, capable, powerful learning identities. These were devised with co-producing the research alongside my focus children in mind. Seeking their active participation and contribution as a primary means of answering the questions set was imperative to me, in doing so prioritising children’s perspectives and honouring their rights and expertise (Clark, 2017).

The research objectives of this project were fourfold. First, I sought to describe the concept of a  sensory learning environment within early childhood settings. This was a description absent in extant research, and is problematic for autistic children as many of whom have sensory processing capabilities that mean they can experience sensory stimuli in ways quite different to typically expected ‘norms’ (Tomchek, Little, Myers & Dunn, 2018). Second, I wanted to explore the micropolitics of entangled intra-actions between the people, spaces, objects and practices that constitute learning environments (Barad, 2007; Fox & Alldred, 2017), and how they in turn produced the autistic active participant and learner. Third, I was interested to learn more about how sensory environments, in doing this, also produced positive learning identities for autistic children. Underpinning all of the above was an objective to have focus children be able to ‘speak’ directly to their experiences within the research as co-producers of it, whatever modality their communications preferences and abilities were (Edwards, Gandini & Forman, 2011; Clark, 2017).

The project drew primarily from an agential realist framework underpinned by new materialist theory (Fox & Alldred, 2017). A key dimension of this framework concerns moving beyond the notion of interaction, which supposes distinct individual agencies preceding their coming together, to that of intra-action which recognises that these agencies are entangled, mutually constituted and emerge through their coming together and resultant production of particular outcomes (Barad, 2007). For this project, the framework allowed me to see how people, spaces, objects and practices within everyday early childhood settings intra-acted in the production of sensory friendly environments that supported the active participation and learning of my focus children. Alongside this also sat an active participation framework of four dimensions – ecological, pedagogic, equitable and inclusive – which recognised children’s rights and citizenship (Mackey & Lockie, 2012; McAnelly & Gaffney, 2017).

Dual sensory ethnographic and new materialist methodological approaches were undertaken when collecting data in bounded ethnographic case studies across two early childhood settings. A sensory ethnographic approach enabled me to come to know, analyse and be able to represent culture through my multisensorial participation in those communities (Pink, 2015). It provided a focus on how senses were produced, categorised and made sense of for focus children, and what role people, spaces, objects and practices played in those processes. A new materialist approach with its theoretical and practical focus on matter highlighted the materiality of the early childhood settings I spent time in, and the people, spaces, objects and practices that constituted them. It emphasised how these were entangled and constantly intra-acting to produce, not construct, the outcome of active participation and learning for focus children within particular events (Barad, 2007). Furthermore, a new materialist approach allowed me to see that the role of the human was not most important and must be de-centred to make space for equitable consideration of the influence and capacities of the non-human in producing active participation and learning for focus children (Fox & Alldred, 2017; Braidotti & Bignall, 2018). Both approaches called for a plethora of data collection tools that allowed participant autistic children the opportunity to meaningfully express their views as co-producers of the research. These included through observations (which I termed ‘event production records’), interviews, photographs, videos, walking tours and visual mapping. The Mosaic Approach was also influential in my planning for respectfully listening to focus children (Clark, 2017). Focus children were actively involved with many of these tools as and when they wished to be, with assent being negotiated with them on a daily basis. Key with each tool was knowing and calling forth the ‘hundred languages’ each child possessed and used to make meaning of the world around them, which did not rely on or privilege their verbal communication capacity (Edwards, Gandini & Forman, 2011; McAnelly, 2018). This was foundational in producing their active participation in the project.

While the main outcomes of the project lay in answering the research questions asked – describing sensory environments in early childhood settings and how these produced the active participation and learning of autistic children as well as supported their realisation of positive learning identities (which I will also touch on during my paper) – I think equally important lessons can be learned from how capably autistic children were demonstrated to meaningfully engage in the project as active participants and co-producers of the research. They had thoughts, feelings, ideas and opinions about the things that affected them, and they were almost without exception ready, willing and able to express those views. Research with autistic children must always have an assumption of their competence at its heart, and respect the ‘hundred languages’ they possess that they may choose to contribute to the research. The project also points to the potential of sensory ethnographic and new materialist approaches to research alongside a multiplicity of child-friendly data collection tools and suggests how, using these as we look to the future, we might advocate for and undertake more inclusive research with (not on) autistic children. Moreover, while the project was conducted in early childhood settings in Aotearoa New Zealand, findings can – and, I hope, will – be applied to research with autistic children in a variety of education settings globally. Their right to have a say and be heard is, despite the uncertain times we all live in, internationally applicable and not optional.

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