Despite schools being exposed to students from refugee backgrounds for decades, many schools still struggle to provide adequate academic and social support for them. As a result, this study sought to better understand the educational experiences of these students by examining their belonging experiences. The belonging experiences were captured in…

This article centres on a research project in which freehand drawings provided a richly creative and colourful data source of children's imagined, ideal learning environments. Issues concerning the analysis of the visual data are discussed, in particular, how imaginative content was analysed and how the analytical process was dependent on an…

A visual research project addressed school children's concepts of ideal learning environments. Drawings and accompanying narratives were collected from Year 5 and Year 6 children in nine Queensland primary schools. The 133 submissions were analysed and coded to develop themes, identify key features and consider the uses of imagination. The…

This paper is based on qualitative research data from a project investigating early childhood boys' constructions of masculinities in relation to sport, health and the body. The focus group data, with 33 boys, has been collected in each of the boys' first three years at school. It is part of the data that will be collected over eight years with…

This paper explores a number of examples of what appeared to be recurring symbolic expressions of spirituality found in my recent research into the spiritual experiences of children in Victorian State primary schools. These expressions appeared in drawings and in conversation. In this paper I use hermeneutic phenomenology and a multidisciplinary…

This arts-based research illustrates how young children engage in "graphic-narrative play"--a personal fantasy-based experience depicted on paper--while representing imaginary worlds centered on the topic, "what the future will be like". The descriptions show how the children not only made representations, but also manipulated…

This article, which is a revised version of a paper presented at the XXIV World Congress of OMEP conference in Melbourne in July 2004, reports on a study that explored young children's (5-9 years) vision of their future environment in South Africa--as temporal dimension, illustrating their conceptual understanding of this concept. A sample of 320…

Stereotypical views of scientists portrayed in the media, and how science is currently taught in Australian schools, both contribute to many students not studying science beyond Year 10. Reports on the status of science teaching in primary schools still tend to focus on the individual teacher's lack of confidence and inadequate content knowledge,…