Joining the Tots: Visual Research Tools to Connect Families and Community in Early Childhood Education

Abstract

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 childhood centres. Our project repositioned teachers and their pedagogy to include the children's wider communities. To achieve this we developed a range of visual tools to build interactions between families, their communities, and the teachers. This article is an introduction to the tools that we created and used as well as the rationale as to why visual research tools work to support teacher engagement in research.