Reimagining challenging behaviour: Children’s voices through arts-based research in primary education

This study explores how primary school children make sense of challenging behaviour through arts-based methods. Drawing on the concepts of ‘voice’ and ‘emergent listening’, it shows how children’s trioramas reflect, reproduce, and occasionally resist the grammar of schooling. They also reveal how institutional and political contexts, including geopolitical tensions such as those surrounding Gaza, shape understandings of behaviour in a Flemish classroom. By reframing dominant understandings of challenging behaviour in educational contexts, the study highlights how art-making and emergent listening can create spaces for alternative expressions and meanings. It invites educators to engage with the complexity of children’s lived experiences.