55 Harvard Educational Review Vol. 89 No. 1 Spring 2019 Copyright © by the President and Fellows of Harvard College The Practice of Listening to Children: The Challenges of Hearing Children Out in an Adult-Regulated World HAENY S. YOON Teachers College, Columbia University TRAN NGUYEN TEMPLETON University of North Texas In this research article, Haeny Yoon and Tran Nguyen Templeton explore the chal- lenges of listening to children in both classrooms and research that purports to center young children. Through two stories from their respective studies, Yoon and Tem- pleton highlight the complexities of following children’s leads given the competing agendas situating the work of teachers and researchers in neoliberal contexts. Time constraints, curricular mandates, and research expectations limit children’s valuable contributions to their sociocultural communities. The authors’ goal is to discuss the possibilities in taking up children’s words, gestures, and moves as knowledge. They contend that children’s voices should not simply be heard for curricular purposes, for adults’ amusement, to forward a neoliberal agenda, or to maximize our own goals and pursuits. Instead, we should listen to understand the creativity and intelligence of young children whose social worlds are meaningful. Keywords: early childhood education, critical childhood studies, literacy, photography, qualitative research, neoliberalism Tran: [Your] mom told me a little bit about how school’s going for you . . . Saryu: Did she tell you that we sit down so much?! [Taking on the teacher’s voice] “Sit down on the rug, sit down on the chairs, sit down on the rug, sit down on the rug!” And she doesn’t want us to talk, almost. Even when we’re play- ing she wants us to be quiet and she wants us to whisper . . . Then we try to get loud and then she hears us and she’s like, “Stop.” We have to. Then she claps. Then we have to follow what she does, and then she says, “K–2, it’s getting very noisy!”