D’warte, J., & Woodrow, C. (2023). Education Sciences 13(1), 4.
D’warte and Woodrow draw on data collected across two countries, Australia and Chili, where children attending the early years of school worked in creative ways with their educators through arts-based methods. Children were assumed to be researchers, with their educators learning more about them through research partnerships. In the Australian context, language mapping and bilingual storytelling were utilised as strategies to help children to represent their strengths, and their lives. In the Chilian context, arts-based approaches were utilised to bring more family experiences into the education contexts as a way to improve educators’ understandings about the children that they were teaching. Strategies such as technology-enabled travelling media, families’ literacies trees and Literacy Cafes were utilised and all are described within this paper. All of the strategies and arts-based approaches were focused on improving educators’ knowledge of the lives of the children that they taught as a way to improve inclusive teaching and learning practices in schools.