Visual Pedagogies, Methodologies, and Educational Research – serie

Seeing the World through Children’s Eyes brings an overarching emphasis on ‘seeing’ to early years research. The book provides an opportunity to see and hear from leading researchers in the field concerning how they work with visual methodologies and young children. It explores the problems, pitfalls and promises that these offer for reflexive, critical inquiry that privileges the ‘work of the eye’ whilst implicating the researcher ‘I’ for what is revealed. Readers are invited to see for themselves what might be revealed through their discoveries, and to contemplate how these ideas might influence their own seeings.See inside the book.

Seeing the World through Children’s Eyes brings an overarching emphasis on ‘seeing’ to early years research. The book provides an opportunity to see and hear from leading researchers in the field concerning how they work with visual methodologies and young children. It explores the problems, pitfalls and promises that these offer for reflexive, critical inquiry that privileges the ‘work of the eye’ whilst implicating the researcher ‘I’ for what is revealed. Readers are invited to see for themselves what might be revealed through their discoveries, and to contemplate how these ideas might influence their own seeings.See inside the book.

This international collection presents theoretical, empirical and practice-led considerations of what can be envisioned as visual pedagogies, offering classic, creative, and contemporary re-workings of these paradigms. In complementary yet overlapping parts, this book explores understandings of visual pedagogies as learning with, through and/or about images, visual and digital environments, embodied performances and immersive experiences. As visual practices in academia gain momentum, the need to navigate visuality in ways that enhance sensibility and awareness of how/what we observe, analyze, criticize and reflect on in any given moment continues to grow. We understand visual pedagogies as nomadic in the sense that the how and the what of image centered learning is not separable. What does this mean? First it means recognizing pedagogical practices as always already implicated. In other words, the form itself carries its own message. Visual pedagogies respond to, and are actualized within, the cultural contexts in which they are working. At the same time, they carry the possibilities of being taken up in diverse ways beyond one particular context. As living morphing practices, visual pedagogies expand on contextual affordances, while at the same time providing the means of exceeding them. Thus there are folk-literacies in perpetual movement that are producing visual pedagogies where points of traction for theorizing and research can form. These then can be mobilized as springboards for analysis and examination of how visual pedagogies become apparent. This book takes up multiple diverse contexts through an international selection of authors. The parts work to address conceptual, empirical and practical considerations through different emphases, yet in conversation with each other.

This international collection presents theoretical, empirical and practice-led considerations of what can be envisioned as visual pedagogies, offering classic, creative, and contemporary re-workings of these paradigms. In complementary yet overlapping parts, this book explores understandings of visual pedagogies as learning with, through and/or about images, visual and digital environments, embodied performances and immersive experiences. As visual practices in academia gain momentum, the need to navigate visuality in ways that enhance sensibility and awareness of how/what we observe, analyze, criticize and reflect on in any given moment continues to grow. We understand visual pedagogies as nomadic in the sense that the how and the what of image centered learning is not separable. What does this mean? First it means recognizing pedagogical practices as always already implicated. In other words, the form itself carries its own message. Visual pedagogies respond to, and are actualized within, the cultural contexts in which they are working. At the same time, they carry the possibilities of being taken up in diverse ways beyond one particular context. As living morphing practices, visual pedagogies expand on contextual affordances, while at the same time providing the means of exceeding them. Thus there are folk-literacies in perpetual movement that are producing visual pedagogies where points of traction for theorizing and research can form. These then can be mobilized as springboards for analysis and examination of how visual pedagogies become apparent. This book takes up multiple diverse contexts through an international selection of authors. The parts work to address conceptual, empirical and practical considerations through different emphases, yet in conversation with each other.

In this book, Dr Rene Novak reveals new ways of understanding children’s play by liberating it from the constraints of standardised educational agendas. Drawing on Heidegger’s concepts of Enframing and poiesis, and phenomenological inquiry, this innovative study explores how immersive virtual reality (VR) videos can serve as metaphysical laboratories. Through vivid, embodied experiences, early childhood educators cross the cybernetic looking glass to become one with play and discover transformative insights for holistic child development.Dr Rene Novak investigates the potential of immersive pedagogy by merging visual pedagogy with embodiment theory to highlight the critical role of teacher presence in educational phenomena. Educators become “invisible observers,” stepping inside the flow of play while relinquishing preconceived enframed discourses and misconceptions. The result is a reshaping of pedagogy and policy, steering away from prescriptive goals toward play as a self-actualising educational experience.By reconceptualising how free play unfolds, this book challenges educators, policymakers, and parents to embrace the true essence of play in early learning. This book is an essential resource for anyone seeking to understand how to foster creativity, social-emotional growth, and deeper engagement in a play-based curriculum.