This article focuses on a carnival in the curriculum project designed to revitalise the arts in the experience of students in Higher Education preparing to become primary school teachers. It argues the relevance of a combined arts or trans‐disciplinary artform in the remit of a visual arts education journal and explores carnival as a complex, inclusive, multifaceted and multidimensional cultural practice with deep historical and social roots. It locates carnival within theory and the debate about the arts in schools in the UK from the early 1980s. Drawing on the analysis of interviews with students and teachers in carnival project schools, issues and themes such as student involvement, creativity, artists in schools, and cross‐curricular learning are explored, concluding that carnival in the curriculum provides an opportunity for agency within the regulated official curriculum.

This article is based on a paper delivered at the CARN Conference, 1995. The authors, who are both early-years professionals, have worked as research associates on the 'Principles into Practice' project based at Goldsmiths' College, London. This is an important national project involving practitioner action research in a number of local authorities. The authors examine the current context of early-years education and reflect on the increasingly marginalised and de-professionalised status of early-years practitioners working with the 0-8 years age range. They examine the impact of recent government policies on the early years field and present case-studies which demonstrate how action research in their own workplace helped practitioners, in a wide range of settings, break through barriers, and develop a renewed sense of professional identity and prestige. They consider the tension between professional re-empowerment and institutional power, and argue that action research can contribute to a knowledge and power base on which to build policies and practices on which all early-years practitioners can agree.

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Celia Burgess-Macey on why young children should be encouraged to join in carnival preparations and celebrations.

In this article I explore contrasting approaches to literacy and learning in Key Stage One classrooms. In particular I question whether the approach to writing composition in the NLS Framework for Teaching is consistent with what we know about children's story telling and writing in the early years. Children are powerful thinkers who constantly strive to make meaningful and playful engagements with their social and cultural worlds, of which texts are an important part. Through composing and writing stories in school the children in this study are often exploring aspects of their identities, having fun in entering into adult and fantasy worlds, and working with their friends to create texts which place them in powerful roles.