This article describes preservice art education students who curated an exhibition for a university gallery, using description and analysis as aesthetic inquiry processes. The students curated an exhibition that placed 1977 Central and Latin American and contemporary children's artworks in dialogue with each other. They constructed themes that…

This article explores the usefulness of detective role-play as a research method to facilitate young children's critical thinking. The study examines four specifically designed detective play experiences, adopting an ethical rights-based approach to research with children. This qualitative multiple-case study is grounded in play-based pedagogy…

This article discusses four exemplary activities to highlight imaginative approaches that encourage critical literacy: building a jackdaw, responding to text through multimodal journaling, engaging in dramatic roleplay, and practicing multi-genre writing. Each activity connects imaginative approaches to critical literacy as learners view the world…

Existing research recognizes the crucial role played by imagination in giving meaning to our experience, thinking critically and paying attention to difference. By using a design based on what we called 'embodied imagination' (analogical reasoning) and 'narrative imagination' (contributions from universal stories), we conduct an exploratory study…

This study presents the research that Pramling Samuelsson's keynote at the 32nd annual EECERA conference in Brighton 2024 drew upon. The study addresses an important but understudied feature of early childhood education and care for sustainability (ECECfS), namely engaging children in prospective or what-if thinking. Our reasoning is founded on…

One afternoon during the early days of the COVID-19 lockdown, as I was retooling my in-person courses for online instruction, I took a break to see how the educators and artists I follow on Instagram were faring. As I scrolled through a variety of posts, I happened upon an image showing a page torn from the 1940 children's book "Lentil"…