![Tran Nguyen Templeton [Image: Courtesy Kara Dry/UNT Photo]](https://voiceofdenton.com/images/2020/02/Discovery-18_0560_tran_templeton05-300x300-1.jpg "Discovery-18_0560_tran_templeton05-300x300.jpg")
An assistant professor at the University of North Texas is researching how children too young to write express themselves and tell stories via photography.
Tran Nguyen Templeton, who teaches in UNT’s College of Education, is researching how 2- to 5-year-olds express their understanding of the world and how they fit into it through photographs.
“If you think about literacy being writing and reading, we don’t often think of very young children as being literate,” Templeton said in a statement. “Literacy takes many forms. Photography is one way of being literate. Kids come into the world, they see images and make sense of those images.”
According to a statement, Templeton works with children in Denton-area classrooms, letting each child take a Kodak digital camera home and take up to 75 photos.
She then prints the photos and goes through them with the child and lets the youngsters tell her which photos are most important to them and why. Templeton asks them to choose five photos to share with their friends and takes note of the differences in what they tell each other versus what they tell her about the photos.
![A photo taken by a young child as part of research by UNT professor Tran Nguyen Templeton. [Photo: Courtesy UNT]](https://voiceofdenton.com/images/2020/02/Discovery-kids-photo.jpg)