Involving children as stakeholders and including their voices in updating the Australian Early Years Learning Framework (for children birth to age 5) was a focus of this project design. The design was grounded in participatory approaches with a children's rights perspective, as the team prioritised seeking children's views and encouraging their…

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…

When researching with or about families in home-based research, there are numerous unexpected ethical issues that can emerge, particularly in qualitative research. This paper is based on reflective accounts of four homed-based research projects, two in the UK and two Australia, which examined ethical dilemmas identified when engaged in home-based…

The initial research undertaken was an attempt to understand what it is like for young children to be in the world. The study was a search to reclaim a sense of place for the teacher/researcher and the children, and to capture young children's profound wondering. This article is a reflective look back at that study and attempts through methods of…

Studies of early childhood educators' perceptions of work intensity and complexity have shown that ensuring a good balance between workload and the time needed to complete the work is critical for work quality, work satisfaction, and staff retention. This article explores the possibilities of time-use data for making visible the diversity and…

Changing perspectives of children and recognition of the importance of researching with, rather than on, children, have contributed to a great deal of interest in participatory research methods. While many participatory methods have been developed to incorporate visual elements, uncertainty remains about the role and purpose of the image within…

Early childhood research has long established that drawing is a central, and important activity for young children. Less common are investigations into the drawing activity of adults involved in early childhood. A team of adult early childhood researchers, with differing exposures and familiarities with drawing, experimented with intergenerational…

The recently reported i3 Scale-Up of Reading Recovery (May et al., 2015) found an effect size of +0.69 in favor of Reading Recovery compared to the control group. We discuss four issues: (a) many of the lowest achieving students were excluded from participation in Reading Recovery; (b) the control group received a range of different experiences;…

This paper reports findings from a classroom based study with 5 year old children in their first term of school. A data modelling activity contextualised by a picture story book was used to present a prediction problem. A data table with numerical data values provided for three consecutive days of rubbish collection was provided, with a fourth day…

Research in the early years places increasing importance on participatory methods to engage children. The playback of video-recording to stimulate conversation is a research method that enables children's accounts to be heard and attends to a participatory view. During video-stimulated sessions, participants watch an extract of video-recording of…

Research Findings: Research with young children is a complex enterprise and often fraught with ethical and practical dilemmas. This paper seeks to discuss the experience of an Australian early childhood academic undertaking research with children 3 to 6 years of age. It draws upon a series of projects that examine young children's standpoints on…

The purpose of this study is to continue research conversations with young children about their lived experiences. A central philosophy underpinning this work seeks an acknowledgment of the "presence" of children and their accounts of life, as an essential element to understanding their social worlds. The research methodology draws upon…

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…

If students are to be equipped with skills necessary to meet the challenging and diverse demands of different forms of communication brought about by the introduction of new technologies, then a broader definition of literacy is required. A pedagogy of multiliteracies recognises that there are multiple modes of representation that communicate…

Australia holds some of the most unique, diverse and vulnerable ecosystems in the world, ranging from marine, coral reefs, to the arid and semi-arid outback, to tropical rainforests. Young children's perceptions of, and attitudes to their environment carry with them into adulthood, determining their capacity to learn about and interact with their…