Assistant professor Tran Nguyen Templeton is helping children express themselves and tell their own stories even though they are not yet old enough to write.

Templeton, who teaches in UNT's College of Education, researches how 2- to 5-year-olds express their understanding of the world and how they fit into it through photography. She works with classrooms of children in the Denton area, letting each child take a Kodak digital camera home and snap up to 75 photos. Templeton prints the photos and goes through them with the child, letting the young photographer explain which pictures are most important and why. She asks them to choose five photos to share with their friends, noting the differences in what they tell each other versus what they tell her about the snapshots.

"For me, it's about having kids be heard," she says.