Abstract
Children’s perspectives are critical yet frequently overlooked in discussions about their own lives. This study centres the perspectives of approximately 80 children in grades 5 (ages 9–10) and 8 (ages 13–14) in urban and rural schools, exploring their experiences during COVID-19 school closures through an innovative visual method that combines body mapping with hypothetical scenarios. By creating body maps for fictional characters, participants expressed emotions and memories tied to their lives during online learning, ensuring anonymity while enabling deep engagement. The method yielded rich, multi-layered data, revealing themes like learning loss, technology access, well-being, and home life impacts while uncovering nuanced insights such as the gendered distribution of domestic labour and academic misconduct. In our study, body mapping proved highly effective in empowering children to articulate their experiences through art and narrative, offering both methodological innovation and critical lessons for future educational research with young people.