The present study reports findings on pre-service teachers' thinking during planning and implementing play-based art activities. "Thinking" (in the present study) is informed by discourses emphasising art teaching and learning in relation to play and theoretical assumptions conceptualising planning as "practice of knowing."…

This article describes how American and Japanese kindergartners see play and what teachers can learn from them. The authors share their findings from analyzing photos and interviews from 44 American children in the southeastern United States and 55 Japanese children in the main island of Japan, all aged five to six years. In the study, children…

In this research article, Haeny Yoon and Tran Nguyen Templeton explore the challenges of listening to children in both classrooms and research that purports to center young children. Through two stories from their respective studies, Yoon and Templeton highlight the complexities of following children's leads given the competing agendas situating…

In this article, the author discusses some of the photographs and videos that her students produced, and shares how their artwork serves as one way that, when given freedom and choice, children will incorporate violent play into their artmaking activities. The author argues that these images are not evidence of inherently violent, dangerous, or…

This research examines a multi-year investigation of preschoolers' experiences participating in a media-driven exploration of informal play experiences as a means to engage children as artists, researchers, and documenters of their own worlds. In this writing, I will explore the ethical issues that arise for adult researchers engaged in…

In the early 1800s, the U.S. President Thomas Jefferson assembled a team of explorers led by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to forge a waterway connecting the Missouri River to the Pacific Ocean. How has this environment changed in 200 years and how do elementary students make sense of those changes? This study looks at the impact of…

This article explores the use of children's photography as a method for conducting mathematics education research with young children. Collected as part of a study focusing on the experiences with measurement children have at the start of schooling, the photographs presented here were taken by children aged five and six years, from two Australian…

Most elementary students approach photography in an open-minded, experimental way. As a result, their images are often more playful than those taken by adults. Students discover more through their own explorations than they would learn through overly structured lessons. In this article, the author describes how he introduces his elementary…

Having taken close to 5000 digital pictures in the last few years, the author can easily say that nearly half of them are of her students' artwork. As stated in her May 2006 article in "SchoolArts", "Digital Diversity," the author uses her photos in everything from digital presentations to parent communication, in permanent art exhibits in school,…

Three-dimensional mind maps are a highly effective tool for providing engaging, kinaesthetic and sensory experiences for young children, with real objects used to promote the sharing of knowledge and the creation of connections. The use of real objects allows children the opportunity to connect with those objects at a personal level, thus placing…

Globalization makes living in the world more complex. Many children live as social cyborgs attached to the digital spaces of the virtual play worlds of television, video and computer games rather than connected to their own local places. The impact of this change may well be that children lack acquaintance with their local places and may never…

The "Handbook of Research Methods in Early Childhood Education" brings together in one source research techniques that researchers can use to collect data for studies that contribute to the knowledge in early childhood education. To conduct valid and reliable studies, researchers need to be knowledgeable about numerous research…

This article describes a study with first grade children and their views on the primary school curriculum, as well as their influence on decision-making in school. The study was conducted with 20 six- and seven-year-old children in one primary school in Reykjavik, Iceland. The data gathered includes varied research methods such as group…

This paper utilises a Vygotskian framework to examine the ways in which teachers shape the creation of children's artwork in educational contexts. Reflexive ethnography and a bottom up approach to discourse analysis are used to analyse a range of qualitative data including photographs, observational notes and audio recordings collected from a Year…

In this decade of Education for Sustainable Development, it is timely to consider the methodological issues associated with researching this topic not only with adults but also with the young children who, as members of the next generation, will experience the success or otherwise of current environmental sustainability efforts. We argue that it…