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The article reports data from an aspect of the study which aimed to study the nature of children's interactions and their perceptions of ability-based groups in a primary classroom in England. Previous studies on ability-based group have mainly used quantitative research designs to study children's interactions and appeared to award less opportunities to children to talk about their experiences of working in ability-based groups. This study has used qualitative ethnographic research design to study children's interactions and their perceptions of working in ability-based groups. Children's interactions were studied using participant observations and debriefing activities were used to elicit children's perspectives on their recorded interactions. Furthermore, informal conversational interviews were also used to hear children's perspectives on their experiences of working in ability-based groups. The article only focuses on data related to children's interactions, which revealed that children appeared to be cooperative, non-cooperative and competitive towards their peers in ability-based groups. We noted that children interpreted the group structure and learning task distinctively when deciding whether or not to work with others in groups. In some cases, children exhibited gender-biased attitudes while interacting with their peers. Children showed cooperative attitudes towards same-sex peers and non-cooperative attitudes towards other-sex peers. The findings highlight the importance of fully understanding children's contexts and their dynamic influences on children's interactions during their routinely organised ability-based group work. These also highlight the importance of listening to children's perspectives while studying their interactions in ability groups in the mainstream primary classrooms.

Ethnographic note-taking in the field is often imbued with emotions, shaped by power relations and influenced by participants' voice and agency. Though enough has been written about ethnography, discussions on the specific challenges of taking notes, particularly in research with children are limited. Drawing on three ethnographic field studies with children in schools in the UK, India and China, this article discusses fieldwork experiences to understand the challenges, dilemmas and complexities around note-taking in the field. Using a reflexive and intersectional lens, this article discusses the role of agency, power and emotions in the experiences of taking notes in child-centred research with children. It conceptualizes the need to understand the complexities when theories are operationalized in real-life research contexts.

AbstractThis article argues for embracing epistemological and methodological diversity in order to advance recent shifts in environmental education that call for alternative spaces for learning. The article narrates our fieldwork experiences of conducting creative research working with children aged 7–9 years old in two primary schools in England, while exploring the children’s immersive experiences with/of treescapes. Through featuring two case study examples, the article demonstrates what happens when children are positioned as co-researchers in inquiries related to environmental education. The work provides an example of ‘re-imagining’ the future of environmental education research, while challenging the common framing of children as ‘the future’, those who should be tasked or inspired to develop their understanding of environmental issues. Instead, the article shifts the focus towards children’s existing knowledge of their natural worlds and emphasises how and why adults should pay attention to these insights and their becoming with a particular focus on diversity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reports the findings from a study that explored children's interactions and their perceptions of working in groups in a primary classroom. Group work among children has been researched widely to highlight its efficacy in influencing children's cognitive and social learning in mainstream classrooms. Such research, however, appears to ignore children's own perspectives, and thus may contribute only slightly to presenting a true picture of children's thinking and their experiences of working with others during their routinely organized group work. This small-scale study was conducted with twenty-seven 9- to 10-year-old children studying in Year Five. Using ethnographic research design, unstructured participant observations were used to study children's interactions, and informal conversational interviews were held with children to listen to their perspectives. The data gathered through observations and interviews were analyzed qualitatively. This article reports findings from the interview data and provides insight on what children think of group work, how children experience group work, and how children want to see group work in the future. With these findings, the article highlights the importance of listening to children's perspectives by practitioners, researchers, and policymakers when organizing group work in the mainstream classrooms.

This paper explores learning about environments with a focus on starting with trees. The paper examines children and young people's perceptions of and engagement with trees, as part of a large grant that sought to examine the dis/benefits of trees for children's lives and learning. In this paper, we attempt to move beyond notions of ‘education for sustainability’ in that we start with knowledges generated with trees. We are concerned that current educational discourses tend to incorporate extractivist perspectives. They also focus on humans rather than the inseparability of the natural world from the human experience as a starting point for research. The paper is based on a large‐scale, transdisciplinary, UK‐based project, rooted in in‐depth, co‐produced research with a total of 545 children and young people, across multiple primary and secondary schools in England and Scotland. The paper begins and exemplifies a new conversation about what starting with trees might enable for studies of education and childhood. We propose the concepts of dwelling, skilling and belonging as a novel framework for ‘starting with trees’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]