Photographs constitute an important visual language in contemporary Swedish preschool, as they are legible to young children themselves. This article aims to examine which notions of the child are represented in preschool photographs, and how these notions correlate to notions of the child expressed in the Swedish preschool curriculum. The…

This qualitative study explores how play informs the making process in a media arts environment. Drawing on Dewey's ([1938]1998). Concepts of experience, purpose, and freedom, we explore how play and making are employed in an out-of-school media arts environment. The purpose of this study is to examine one child's use of digital media in this…

Play is a place of diverse meaning-making for young children and often central to family life. This paper reports on a family study in which the authors analyse Author One's family photos of young children's play across four generations. The photo analysis shows continuity and transformations in the types of play activities the young children…

Young children in many parts of the world are spending more time in formal education and care settings. As children have the right to be heard on matters that affect them, their views about the early childhood environments they inhabit, need to be included in the process of placemaking. Early childhood environments have the potential to shape a…

This study explored options for pedagogical photo documentation in early childhood education and care (ECEC) practices to hear the voices of children, parents, and guardians in ways that make developing the documentation manageable for practitioners. Two Japanese kindergartens participated in an action research project entitled 'Wall Newspapers…

This article focuses on children's perspectives of belonging to a place, in this case a Finnish preprimary school setting. This study explores "place-belonging" in photographs originally taken by the children in their preprimary school activities. "Photo-telling" was applied as a methodology to link narrative and visual…

This article is a condensed version of the author's research which explores the relationship between imaginative play and creativity in education, and examines the structures, approaches, benefits, and obstacles surrounding the topic of imaginative play and creativity. The photo collection is a reflection on the ponderings throughout the author's…

The more-than-human turn in early childhood education has highlighted the relevance of children's intra-actions with their environment, as well as the multiple ways in which worlds and literacies emerge in them. The rejection of representationalism as the single source of knowledge leads to the consideration of affect, embodiment, memories, sound…

This paper introduces the concept 'mutual experiences' to highlight how a researcher's sensory experiences may contribute to producing knowledge concerning children's bodily play in a natural environment. The article also demonstrates how photo-interviews can give a researcher virtual access to places and events where s/he cannot be present. The…

For the past year, I have been focused on introducing preschool-aged children to technology within their artmaking and play spaces. The intent of bringing technology into these spaces was focused on how young children experience technology when they are trusted to use and care for the materials. This exploration, and my thinking about it, has been…

This article describes a project-based social studies activity that gave young children the autonomy to photograph what they wanted within the classroom environment while interacting with peers. Social studies learning in the early years has great potential to offer active, playful, and meaningful experiences for children and can prepare young…

Children's authentic participation is increasingly recognized in early childhood education as a basis for improving children's engagement and learning outcomes. This study explored the implementation of the Photo Projective Method in a kindergarten in Japan. Participants were two teachers and 35 children, aged 5 years, enrolled in one kindergarten…

This article takes as its starting point a recognition of play as meaning-making, and the playground as a rich and dynamic 'meaning-makerspace' where children draw moment-to-moment, rapidly and readily on the multiple resources available to them to make signs of their interest evident. These resources are drawn from their own lifeworlds, folkloric…

In the nineteenth century city child rescuers developed 'a taxonomy of space' in which geography determined destiny. The privatised spaces of the middle classes were contrasted with the 'dirt, disease and delinquency' of the slums. Yet at the same time as 'dirt' was viewed as 'destructive' and proof of urban neglect it was also accepted in the…

Global connections are an important part of the elementary classroom as they help students develop empathy through interactions while allowing them to apply classroom learning to the outside world (Suvansri 2016). Through Partnering with a classroom in another country the author hoped to create curiosity while helping students build a global…