The field of participatory research with children developed largely thanks to shared learning between different cultures, places, and disciplines. However, grand narratives and power relationships in academia inherited from colonialism and imperialism can threaten to obstruct the transformative value of this approach. In this article, we present the case of Think Big, a multinational collaboration for participatory research with children that involved adult and child coresearchers from Australia, Chile, Colombia, and the United Kingdom. Our aim was to explore how this project helped build solidarities between adult researchers from different countries and disciplines. We applied a methodology of diffraction to explore the processes and outcomes of this collaboration and presented our insights using the metaphor of a tree to explain the roots (knowledges and frameworks), trunk (ongoing collaboration and communication between the teams from different countries), branches (local projects), and fruits (research outcomes) of our work. Based on our experience, we proposed that multinational collaborations for participatory research offer important opportunities for adult researchers to collaborate with children to generate more democratic knowledge about their lives and to generate more egalitarian relationships between adult researchers from different places and backgrounds. However, it is important to anticipate that multinational collaborations are more likely to be affected by social and political upheavals, and language barriers must be overcome to decentralize academia. Also, the organizations involved in these collaborations need to develop strategies that facilitate funding, ethics clearance, and international research agreements.

The literature tells us that art can enhance the teaching of science. We have used some of these documented strategies in our teaching of microbiology in primary - and high school outreach and in our microbiology classes at university. We have blended art and science in a variety of ways (e.g. dancing and telling stories) to provide our students with richer, more memorable learning experiences. Primary school students were treated to a day of immersion in microbiology where songs, animations, peer learning, art and baking became integral to their learning. For high school outreach, we imagined time travel and invited university acting students to play scientists telling their stories from history to bring to life ‘moments’ in microbiology. At university, first-year students danced like bacteria to reinforce the types of movement and appendages that some bacteria have. Humour, poetry, songs and mnemonics were also used to not only enhance learning but to remind students that learning is fun and encompasses all aspects of life. We continue to explore a transdiciplinarity approach were the boundaries between disciplines are blurred and the artist becomes a scientist and vice versa on a creative holistic learning journey of discovery.

In 2003, a template research agreement received ethical approval from the ANU for use in connection with the doctoral research project “Masked Corroborees of the Northwest.” It was intended to recognize Indigenous ownership of cultural heritage consistent with best practice. Agreements based on the template were signed with a number of traditional owners confirming that video footage produced in the research documentation process would be jointly owned. Researcher Dominique Sweeney was then, and remains today, comfortable with restricting his own use to educational purposes. In 2017, one of the Aboriginal Art and Culture Centers involved in the project expressed interest in accessing commercial returns from the video. Revisiting the legal effect of those agreements revealed unforeseen complications. It was not as straightforward as it should have been for the traditional owners to unlock commercial returns from the video archive. This article explores the legal and technical considerations in the ongoing process of making available research video archives to traditional owners with whom the research was done.

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