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The starting point for this article is a film about Scottish education, Children's Story. Children's Story was one of a group of seven documentaries made for the 1938 British Empire Exhibition in Glasgow, under the supervision of John Grierson. The film was an official entry into the Exhibition and is a formal display of key ideas and elements of Scottish education - past, present and (especially) future. The film will be used to raise questions for researchers in the histories of education about using moving film as research data, or within the research process. Questions related to the use-value of film in educational research are central to our article. The article is organised in three parts, and followed by a conclusion; they are the film as a record, the documentary film movement and the visual as the object of research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article deals with the heuristic potentials of the documentary film Children's Parks in the historical and visual treatment of educational subjects and objects. We will choose specific moments in the film in order to discuss theoretical and methodological questions implied in the relationship between images and words, aiming to understand how pictorial meaning is connected to the production of specific kinds of subjectivities. Each section will mobilise different levels of description and analysis, with the result being an article whose outcome is itself a multi-level process that recasts and restructures the pictorial content of the film. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]