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This article offers detailed accounts of self-study research conducted by two South African teachers who used drawing as an arts-based method to gain insights from children in their schools. While much of the published research on drawing as a self-study method has involved drawing by teachers or teacher educators, the focus here is on two teacher-researchers' learning from engaging with children's drawings. The body of the article is arranged as a dialogue facilitated by the teachers' research supervisor. The two original research exemplars presented in the dialogue illustrate how drawing can be a productive, age-appropriate, and enjoyable mode of bringing children into self-study research. Taken as a whole, the dialogue shows how drawing as a self-study research method can enable the expression of children's perspectives and experiences, foster a more intrinsically gratifying research experience for children, heighten self-study researchers' learning from and with children as research partners, and enrich the emotional substance and impact of research with children. This work will be valuable to teachers in diverse contexts who are interested in expanding their repertoire of child-friendly self-study research methods. Furthermore, it can serve as a reminder to pay conscientious and self-reflexive attention to the human relationships and emotions that give life to all self-study research.

We are South African self-study researchers who started building our collaborative relationship as critical friends completing our doctoral studies. We have a keen interest in self-study research, and we all received our doctorates through self-study using arts-based research. Our collective self-study explores our doctoral work as critical friends teaching and learning using arts-based research in education. This article presents how we used memory work in a self-study project to elicit childhood memories for teacher--learner engagement and mentor--mentee knowledge sharing. We understand that a sociocultural theoretical perspective highlights the fundamental requirement of working together in educational contexts to make sense of collective and personal experiences. In addition, employing self-study research and revisiting our learning has assisted or even encouraged us to engage deeply with past life experiences to improve our teaching practice. We understand that our past experiences have the power to shape our teaching practices now and in the future. Although these experiences occur both inside and outside the classroom, the principles that we endorse remain the same: collaborative and interactive teaching and learning, and acknowledging the children's and our own earlier learning and backgrounds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers detailed accounts of self-study research conducted by two South African teachers who used drawing as an arts-based method to gain insights from children in their schools. While much of the published research on drawing as a self-study method has involved drawing by teachers or teacher educators, the focus here is on two teacher-researchers' learning from engaging with children's drawings. The body of the article is arranged as a dialogue facilitated by the teachers' research supervisor. The two original research exemplars presented in the dialogue illustrate how drawing can be a productive, age-appropriate, and enjoyable mode of bringing children into self-study research. Taken as a whole, the dialogue shows how drawing as a self-study research method can enable the expression of children's perspectives and experiences, foster a more intrinsically gratifying research experience for children, heighten self-study researchers' learning from and with children as research partners, and enrich the emotional substance and impact of research with children. This work will be valuable to teachers in diverse contexts who are interested in expanding their repertoire of child-friendly self-study research methods. Furthermore, it can serve as a reminder to pay conscientious and self-reflexive attention to the human relationships and emotions that give life to all self-study research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]