This article explores the processes and practices of doing participatory research with children. It explores how this process can be represented in writing. The article comes out of a project funded by Creative Partnerships UK, in which a creative agent, three artists and a researcher all worked within an elementary school in South Yorkshire, UK, for two years, to focus on the children's Reasons to Write. It considers whether it is truly possible for children to enter the academic domain. Using a number of different voices, the article interrogates this. It particularly focuses on children's role in analysing and selecting important bits of data. It engages with the lived realities of children as researchers. It considers ways in which children's voices can be represented, and also acknowledges the limitations of this approach for adults who want to write academic peer reviewed articles. Ideas the adults thought were clever were found to be redundant in relation to children's epistemologies. The article considers the process that is involved in taking children's epistemologies seriously.

In this article, we bring together relational arts practice (Kester, 2004) with collaborative ethnography (Campbell and Lassiter, 2015) in order to propose art not as a way of teaching children literacy, but as a lens to enable researchers and practitioners to view children's literacies differently. Both relational arts practice and collaborative ethnography decentre researcher/artist expertise, providing an understanding that "knowing" is embodied, material and tacit (Ingold, 2013). This has led us to extend understandings of multimodal literacy to stress the embodied and situated nature of meaning making, viewed through a collaborative lens (Hackett, 2014a;Heydon and Rowsell, 2015;Kuby et al, 2015;Pahl and Pool, 2011). We illustrate this approach to researching literacy pedagogy by offering a series of "little" (Olsson, 2013) moments of place/body memory (Somerville, 2013), which emerged from our collaborative dialogic research at a series of den building events for families and their young children. Within our study, an arts practice lens offered a more situated, and entwined way of working that led to joint and blurred outcomes in relation to literacy pedagogy.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to report on video making in two different contexts within the Community Arts Zone research project, an international research project concerned with the connections between arts, literacy and the community. Design/methodology/approach – At one project site, researchers and parents from the community filmed their children making dens with an artist. At another site, a professional film crew filmed young people engaged in arts practice in school settings. Findings – In both cases, researchers, artists and community participants collaborated to do research and make video. This paper discusses the ways that this work was differently positioned at the two sites. These different positionings had implications for the meaning ascribed to video making from the point of view of the participants, researchers and artists involved. Originality/value – By drawing on perspectives of researchers and artists, the paper explores implications for video making processes within ethnographic research. These include a need for awareness of the diversity and fragmentation of the fields of both visual research and visual arts practice. In addition, the relationship between research and the visual is unfolding in a context in which the digital is increasingly ubiquitous in everyday life. Therefore the authors argue for the need for researchers and artists to explore their epistemological assumptions with regards to video and film, and to consider the role of the digital in the lives of their participants. The coming together of these positions and experiences is what constructs the meaning of the digital and visual in the field.

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