Project RITE

This research project includes video taping preservice early childhood teachers as they teach preschool children in the UT Early Learning Center for Research and Practice (ELC)on White Avenue.  The preservice teachers are junior-level undergraduates who are majoring in early childhood education in the Department of Child and Family Studies.  The ELC is a laboratory school and is a place for students to practice teaching.  At White Avenue the children range in age from 3-6 years.  Although parents agree to have their children video taped and photographed when they enroll them, securing permission from the university IRB is especially challenging as children are clearly a vulnerable population. 

I developed a two-tiered procedure for parent consent and I believe this process was especially important as educators strive to protect the privacy of children while often being dependent upon image-based research.  Basically, parents were requested to consent to having their children included in video tapes that would be analyzed by me and my research team of students.  This analysis would remain located in my research lab and the tapes only viewed by us.  Once analyzed, clips of video tapes were selected to be included in what I call, video-narratives.  A video-narrative is a document created by a teacher that includes text and tape, with video clips embedded in text.  The text is dictated by the preservice teacher to me through iterative cycles of analyses of video tapes of her teaching.  Concurrently, her tapes are being edited by a technology specialist, following the directions of the preservice teacher.  When particular video clips end up in a video-narrative, a second parent consent form is sent to parents requesting permission to include video footage of their child(ren) in video-narratives.  This second level of consent, then, is typically requested of only a few of the total number of parents. who originally consented to allow their children to be video taped.  This higher level of consent is particularly important because the video-narratives will now be used in professional conference presentations, and possibly as part of an on-line journal article.

 In summary, it was challenging to write my IRB proposal to clearly describe the extra precautions necessary to protect the privacy of young children.  I believe this two-tiered parental consent protocol is a good answer to this need to assure we protect children’s privacy when conducting image-based research in school settings. 

Mary Jane Moran, Associate Professor, CFS