About

Tran N. Templeton is an Assistant Professor and Co-Director of the Rita Gold Center at Teachers College, Columbia University. Her scholarly interests include politics of childhood, critical childhood studies, visual sociology, critical early childhood curriculum, early childhood literacies and play, children’s environments and geographies, disability studies in education, and qualitative, image-based, and ethnographic research methods. Her work takes up a critical childhoods framework that troubles the adult-child binary, focusing on how social and political structures, policies, and phenomena influence childhoods, as well as how young children negotiate and refigure their social worlds and identities. Through visual research examining children’s photographs, performances, and narrations, Tran juxtaposes children’s perspectives against adult representations, emphasizing how adults often misrecognize and misrepresent children, especially young and disabled children. Her research explores the implications of these misrecognitions for educational practices, policies, and curriculum, advocating for enlarging adult visions of children to better account for their desires, interests, and social realities. Her work also addresses the politics of childhood, questioning which children are afforded rights and protections and for whom educational institutions are designed. Prior to her academic career, Tran was a special education teacher, founding program director of Colegio Monarch in Guatemala, and an early childhood teacher. She has received fellowships and recognition from organizations such as AERA and the Literacy Research Association, and she currently serves as an Associate Editor of the journal Exceptional Children. Her research and teaching include topics such as critical pedagogies, visual research methods, children’s environments, and multi-species relations.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Pedagogy
• Developmental psychology
• Psychology
• Political Science
• Gender studies
• Art
• Social Science
• Literature
• Visual arts
• Ecology
• Law
• Communication
• Mathematics education
• Aesthetics

Selected publications

• Borderlands Childhoods: An Exploration of Transfronterizx Children's Fotografías

  American Educational Research Journal · 2026-03-29

  articleSenior author

  Given mainstream narratives that depict the borderlands as a place of fear and violence, this study offers alternative visuals that highlight how transfronterizx children view their language and literacy practices in relation to their experiences in the Texas–Mexico borderlands. The study draws on borderlands biliteracies and critical childhood studies to analyze the children's fotografías and photo-elicitation interviews. The findings demonstrate how the children were reading and writing the world through the lens of borders and border crossing. These perspectives and worldviews have implications for how schools can more responsively and humanely serve children who live and learn across—and within—boundaries of social, cultural, and physical geographies.

  PublisherDOI

• Working the Image

  2026-02-05

  book-chapterSenior author

  The use of visual methodologies within the area of qualitative research has seen a marked shift over the last century. These changes have been driven by a variety of factors: the development of camera technologies, approaches to visual research, increasing attention to the ethics of image-making and circulation, among others. In this chapter, we articulate some significant shifts in visual methodologies related to camera technologies, approaches to visual research, and ethics in image-making. Finally, accounting for the ubiquity of image-making technologies and practices in everyday life, we consider emergent methodological turns that will continue to reframe the field over the coming years.

  PublisherDOI

• Everything is Possible: Play as Portal to Just Futures

  The Critical Social Educator · 2025-09-11

  article

  Everything is Possible: Play as Portal to Just Futures Harper Keenan, The University of British Columbia Tran N. Templeton, Teachers College, Columbia University Akiea “Ki” Gross, Woke Kindergarten To cite this article: Keenan, H., Templeton, T.N., & Gross, A. (2025). Everything is possible:

  PublisherDOI

• Tableaux (and Children) That Resist Reading

  Studies in Art Education · 2024-04-02 · 2 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Scatological Matters and a Politics of Care in Early Childhood

  Teachers College Record The Voice of Scholarship in Education · 2024-10-01 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Background or Context: Early childhood education in the United States has increasingly abdicated its role in caregiving. A central argument we make in this article is that the separation of care from education in early childhood has shaped how caregiving routines unfold, with significant implications for how children—particularly children of Color attending predominantly white early childhood institutions—come to understand themselves and their social positions. We theorize this as part of a broader politics of care, which we define as the inequitable access to meaningful care practices in early childhood settings. Purpose, Objective, Research Question, or Focus of Study: In this work, we focus on data from a study set within an early childhood site that actively emphasized its status as a “school,” rather than as “childcare.” By foregrounding the site’s practices around a caregiving routine like toileting, we demonstrate how the institutional framing of care impacts children’s experiences and the formation of their social identities. Simultaneously, we discuss how one young child’s use of photography served as a form of resistance, enabling him to “talk back” to how institutional discourses around care and schooling positioned him. Research Design: This is a theoretical project that uses data to instantiate the theory. We first walk the reader through our theoretical and conceptual framework, which draws on the historical separation of care from education in the United States, as well as literature related to a politics of care in early childhood education. We then exemplify the theory through a study of one school’s caregiving practices and a child’s experiences with these practices. The research featured within this article utilizes a multiphasic process of image-based research with young children. Conclusions or Recommendations: This data highlights the power relations at play within tensions created by the care–education divide. Using disability studies in education and critical childhood studies together, we can see how, in moments where care is withheld, Oliver (the focal child) is racialized and simultaneously treated as more incompetent than other children. His race, gender, age, and body played a role in the ways school worked to contain him, both on the playground and in the bathroom.

  PublisherDOI

• Play as Liberatory Practice

  The Critical Social Educator · 2024-12-11

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Though it is often said in early childhood circles, it bears repeating for all children, youth, and adults: play is a basic human right. 'Basic' suggests something easily accessible, but the reality is far from the ideal. While play has been elevated to the same essential status as nutrition, sleep, and other fundamental needs, society is structured to privilege some and deny others the physical, social, and intellectual dimensions of play. This is not to mention the inner life and sense of self and place within society that play affords us. This issue of TCSE—edited by Templeton, Keenan, Gross, and Fox—highlights long-standing and contemporary threats to children’s play. The authors in this issue present the ways that adults interpret—and at times limit—play for children. Adult interpretations are situated within larger social forces such as settler colonialism, developmentalism, militarization, state violence, and white supremacy, discourses that are no doubt entangled with each other. Juxtaposed with these articles are works produced by children, reminders of what is still possible despite the adult gaze. This issue is one of a double issue; the second (forthcoming) offers more ways forward toward collective liberation through honoring children’s play in its myriad forms.

  PublisherDOI

• Sitesensing

  2023-07-10

  book-chapterSenior author

  Young children develop their attachments and sense of being with space when they encounter new and familiar places; their social, material, and affective encounters with/in space—past and present—become part of their meaning-making. In this chapter, the authors take up a critical childhood's perspective to account for the spatial practices that young children undertake to co-construct their own worlds. Using data from their respective research studies with toddlers and preschoolers, the authors discuss how attuning to the sensuality of our sites allows them to better see, hear, and sense aspects of the environment which were critical to their participants’ ways of knowing.

  PublisherDOI

• Reflecting, Representing, and Expanding the Narrative(s) in Early Childhood Curriculum

  Urban Education · 2022 · 10 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Social Science
  • Pedagogy

  In this manuscript, we recognize that young children learn stories that propagate white supremacist narratives through selective traditions of early childhood curriculum. The role of early childhood teachers, therefore, is to critically examine curriculum for biases, omissions, and distortions, as well as to rewrite curriculum to tell accurate stories and disrupt what Viet Thanh Nguyen refers to as “narrative scarcity”. Through a qualitative study of pre-service teachers’ (PSTs) re-imaginings and revisions of early childhood structures, processes, and texts, we highlight the moves that teachers made to rectify, represent and expand narratives related to communities of Color.

  PublisherDOI

• A Panda Bear Named Potato Chip: Young Children's Play at Visual Literacies

  The Reading Teacher · 2022-11-13 · 4 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Whose Story Is It? Thinking Through Early Childhood with Young Children’s Photographs

  Occasional Paper Series · 2021 · 13 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Psychology
  • Pedagogy
  • Visual arts

  Child-centered practices and pedagogies of listening to children are part and parcel of progressive early childhood education. As critical early childhood teachers and researchers, we demonstrate that we value the voices and narratives of children by placing them at the center of our classroom and research agendas. Simultaneously, however, young children’s social position can put them at the mercy of adults’ (teachers’ and researchers’) whims, and their stories may easily be consumed in the name of provocative classroom displays or academic articles. This work explores the potential for visual participatory research, guided by critical childhood studies, to grasp the stories that young children themselves want to tell. Through interviews and group meetings wherein young children (ages 2 to 5) show, gesture, and talk about the photographs they take, the children and their peers make determinations as to how their stories take shape. The narrative I share in this work illustrates one young child’s identity work during the Collaborative Seeing process. Jaylen’s participation in the study speaks to how we can come to see and know children on their terms.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Haeny S. Yoon

  Columbia University

  4 shared

• Chris Moffett

  University of North Texas

  2 shared

• Akiea Gross

  1 shared

• Ranita Cheruvu

  1 shared

• Erika Blood

  Northern Illinois University

  1 shared

• Kuan-Hui Leu

  1 shared

• Amanda Reeves Fellner

  1 shared

• Andrea Flower

  University Health Care System

  1 shared

Labs

• Teachers College, Columbia UniversityPI

Education

• Ph.D., Early Childhood Education

  Teachers College, Columbia University

• M.S., Curriculum and Teaching

  Teachers College, Columbia University

• B.A., Special Education

  University of Texas at Austin

Awards & honors

• 2017-2018 AERA Minority Dissertation Fellow
• 2019-2021 STAR cohort of the Literacy Research Association
• 2023 Emerging Scholar of AERA's Critical Perspectives in Ear…