Understanding children's experience is increasingly a key purpose of much educational research. In contrast to traditional approaches to the study of children that emphasized the socialization of children through various stages of development, researchers within the social constructionism perspective begin with an insistence that childhood is a social construction that varies with time and place (Holloway & Valentine, 2000; James, Jenks & Prout, 1998). They study children as social actors, as beings in their own right rather than as pre-adult becomings. Children are seen as active beings whose agency is important in the creation of their own life worlds. Although such research draws on adult perspectives to discern how children's lives are shaped by forces beyond their own control, it recognizes the importance of learning children's ways of proceeding and ways of making sense of their experience.