Researching well-being has gained popularity over the last decades however, research methodologies have employed mostly surveys, and the use of qualitative and visual methods is still scarce. This study discusses using timelines as a tool for researching the well-being of student teachers in two different cultural contexts. Research data includes…

In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in student and teacher voice in education. What distinguishes 'teacher voice' or 'student voice' from simply reflecting participants' views as a source of data is the placement of participants in an empowered participatory position. It is the positioning of their voice as consisting of more…

Purpose: This study considers the pedagogical dimensions of an event concept ]that combined participatory theatre and social scientific research to approach questions relating to ethnic relations and racism. The article aims to establish, with the help of a practical case example, the notion of public social pedagogy. Approach: Ethnographic…

This study explores how children construct their belonging in culturally diverse early childhood settings in Finland and Iceland. Belonging is understood as a holistic phenomenon that is constructed through various relations. The study is a multiple-case study, influenced by ethnographic approaches, conducted with children in two preschool…

This article analyses intergenerational research encounters when collaborating with children. It contemplates the possibilities of applying participatory research methods in situations where the research agenda and main research methods have been decided before contacting the research subjects, as these must be explained in the ethical statement…

An in-service training programme was used as an accelerator that scaffolded teachers in four school units in Lappeenranta, Finland, the aim being to find a shared understanding and shared practices, or 'praxis', in terms of promoting student participation. In this study we examine the practices that either supported or prevented participation from…

This paper investigates adult-child interaction in the early years of education. The intention is to understand how children's initiatives and practitioners' responses support and/or hinder children's agency. Our ethnographic data include 150 h of video data supplemented by observational field notes from a Finnish Early Childhood Education (ECE)…

This article introduces the art-based action research (ABAR) methodology as part of the international discussion of art-based educational research (ABER). The participatory and dialogical approach of ABAR was inspired by a consideration of the pressure for change in art education stemming from the practices of relational and dialogical…

This paper explores arrangements and conditions enabling and constraining teacher collaboration to extend classrooms through Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs). It draws implications from a participatory action research project in three small, rural Finnish schools funded by the European Social Fund (2015-2017). Data were mainly collected…

The purpose of this study was to investigate children's self- and social perceptions of success to identify how success could be promoted in a classroom context. Using a participatory approach, this study explored children's subjective experiences with success in 41 learning situations selected by researchers (Phase 1: self-perceptions) and 48…

This article makes a connection between narrative ethnography, childhood studies and new materialist theories in studying children's perspective on school. It presents "children writing ethnography" as an approach based on complexity and involving participatory research. The question of "what is happening in the classroom" is…

This paper is based on work done at IdeaSquare, a new innovation experiment at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. The paper explores the translation of fundamental research into societal applications with the help of multidisciplinary student teams, project- and problem-based learning and design thinking methods. The theme is…

The present study shows how the mixed-methods approach can be used in capturing and organising learning environment (LE) characteristics for the participatory design of psychosocial and physical LEs involving learners. Theoretical constructs were tested and further elaborated on in the analysis of two similar educational design research studies:…

This article presents a comparative case study on the ways in which children's school ecologies facilitate their adjusting positively to first grade in risk-filled contexts in South Africa and Finland. The insights of two children (one South African, one Finnish) from socio-economically disadvantaged communities, their teachers, parents and…

This article reports the development and results of a project within the Comenius program to promote teachers' occupational well-being, in which Finnish, Irish, Italian, and German school communities participated between 2003 and 2006. The project made use of participatory action research, in which the occupational well-being of staff was…