Over a two-year teacher-researcher project in New Zealand we used a mosaic of research methods (Clark, 2010) to capture the perspectives of staff, parents and children. As a team of teachers and academic researchers, we recorded and documented reconceptualised pedagogical practices that included active adult participation in a cluster of early…

This article reports research that critically examined our teacher education outdoor education pedagogy. The purpose was to use visual ethnography to critique our teaching over twenty years of annual five-day bush-based residential camps. The bush camps were situated in an outdoor education programme contributing to a four-year undergraduate…

A priority toward creating "active" citizens has been a feature of curricula reforms in many income-rich nations in recent years. However, the normative, one-size-fits-all conceptions of citizenship often presented within such curricula obscure the significant differences in how some young people experience and express citizenship. This…

In this paper we describe a method for exploring young children's views of illness causality in social context. Studies of children's conceptualisation of illness have predominantly focused on the nature of children's knowledge rather than locating that knowledge within socio-cultural contexts. Adopting a socio-constructivist perspective we sought…

The use of portfolios in teacher education has grown in popularity over the last decade. Attempts to harness the potential of portfolios as a means to enhance learning and reflection have sometimes led to a complex or document-driven process that appears several steps removed from the act of teaching. In response this paper describes the…

Samoan school children living in New Zealand were given disposable cameras and asked to photograph examples of the uses of reading and writing outside the school. Interviewed later, they explained their photographs including information about literacy in church and family. Rote learning and oral presentation of biblical texts that were read and…

In this article we aim to explore those points at which migrant identity and landscape intersect. We also consider implications for holistic models of counselling with migrant groups. The New Zealand migration literature was the starting point to consider how and why the experience of migration has been studied. We asked how collective biography…

This paper reports on a New Zealand study that obtained firsthand narrative accounts from a group of Year 10 (14 to 15 years old) secondary school students who were provided with 27-exposure disposable cameras on which they were asked to take a series of photographs to record what a residential school camp was like for them. Follow-up individual…

Recent research (Te One, 2009) investigated perceptions of children's rights in a New Zealand early childhood care and education service (the Creche) for under-two-year-olds. Focus group interviews, interviews with teachers, observational field notes, photographs and a researcher's journal were used to generate data. Findings revealed that…

This paper first describes how activities using photographs of an early childhood education centre, and children's own photographs of that environment, were found to be effective ways of enabling young children (aged from two to four years old) to share their thoughts about their experiences. However, in reflecting on the data, it was recognised…

This paper seeks to explore how we might understand young people's agency in sexuality research using visual methods. It is concerned with troubling the perception that power is held by the adult researcher and denied to youthful participants who simply submit to their authority. Rather than attempting to cast moments of young people's agency as…

Visual methods are often marginalized in educational research and have not been employed to collect information about sexuality at school. This paper examines the viability and effectiveness of conducting research about the "sexual cultures" of schools in New Zealand using photo-diaries and photo-elicitation. "Effectiveness" is…

The growth of interest in historical research into the commonplace provides opportunities to explore the different means through which we can understand the everyday world of teachers. Unlike the "well-known" in education past, where significant traces of their lives remain in archives and official records, little such evidence exists of…

This research focused on the observation of infants between the ages of 2 and 18 months with regard to their aesthetic preferences for a variety of visual stimuli. These stimuli included: a black-and-white schematic drawing of a baby, a popular cartoon image, a colorful abstract painting of a baby, and a photographic image of a baby's face. Prior…

The often portrayed media image of the scientist is a rather strange one, grim-looking scientists, usually male, poised beside incomprehensible instruments. It is little wonder that we encounter the stereotype of the bespectacled scientist; thick black rims, coke bottle lenses, roman sandals, dressed in lab coats, trousers up to their necks. A…