A B S T R A C TResearchers who deal with inclusive education have made great efforts to listen to the voices of children in order to understand marginalization. Despite the fact that these efforts take place, the voices of many children fail to be heard and hence many children continue to be marginalized. In this article we will develop and implement a technique in order to understand and address marginalization. We will develop a technique that uses children's drawings and a simultaneous talk with children to reveal voices of marginalization. We fi rst defi ne the technique by presenting its theoretical background and then illustrate how the method has been used. Using evidence from a school in Cyprus, we demonstrate how children's drawings and simultaneous discussion with the creator of the drawing can help us develop a richer understanding of marginalization. K E Y W O R D S Cyprus education, early childhood drawings, inclusion, marginalization '… what children say about teaching, learning and schooling is not only worth listening to but provides an important -perhaps the most important -foundation for thinking about ways of improving schools' (Rudduck et al., 1996: 1) dots, dots, dots! Narrated by A.M. It was a Wednesday morning in a class with 22 fi ve-year-old children. It was time for free activities and children were sitting around circular tables in groups of four or fi ve. Some of them played table games and the rest drew with colour pencils. George Downloaded from journal of early childhood research 7(1) 28 was drawing and seemed absorbed in what he was doing. At some point the teacher passed by his desk and she looked at his drawing. 'You are drawing dots! Do you only know how to make dots? Do something sensible so that we can understand it!' 'You don't know what I'm doing', George answered angrily and without looking at his teacher he bent his head sadly towards the fl oor. The teacher turned towards me and told me: 'From the time he came to our school he only draws lines and makes dots.' Given my effort to develop a technique for discussing children's drawings in order to locate children who experience marginalization, this episode urged me to observe George more closely and to discuss his drawings with him [see drawing 1]. Little by little, I managed to develop a good relationship with him. It was a relationship of trust and friendship. Very often he told me that his classmates made fun of him because he drew dots. As time passed he began to talk to me about his 'dots' . Initially he told me:'This is a broken road' and he showed the circular lines he had drawn on the paper. drawing 1 (George) 'The rain breaks the road and goes to the sea'

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The changes taking place during the pandemic regarding the interchange between online and face-to-face teaching in the Department of Education of an Eastern Mediterranean private university, led to the need of instructors not only to revisit knowledge on creativity but to examine the views and perceptions of early childhood student-teachers about creativity. More specifically, through informal interviews, we examined 15 junior early childhood student-teachers’ beliefs concerning creativity in general and the traits of a creative individual, whether creativity can be developed in education, and how it could contribute to early childhood teachers’ professional development. In this article, we summarize a qualitative descriptive study that took place in the context of the course Designing Activities in Kindergarten and describe the results from the semi-structured interviews that aimed to find out early childhood student-teachers’ views on creativity providing evidence for the participants’ need for a framework and strategy to guide their creative instructional design and teaching.