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This autoethnographic exploration of pedagogy or the craft of teaching was undertaken while I worked as a reception class teacher in a large English primary school. Naturally occurring data that developed out of the process of teaching and learning were used to construct multiple case studies (Stake, 2006). An iterative process of analysis using inductive and deductive methods enabled me to explore the nuances of pedagogical practice, including those that had been tacitly or intuitively known. The work of Hart, Dixon, Drummond and McIntyre (2004) Learning without Limits, and the metaphor of craft were used as a theoretical framework to support this exploration of how and why pedagogical choices and decisions were made and justified. Analysis revealed how pedagogical thinking was embedded within the complex process of life within the community. Commitment to the core idea of learners’ transformability and the principles coagency, everybody and trust (Hart et al., op. cit.) were found to be necessary but not sufficient to explain pedagogical thinking. A principled belief in possibility was added to articulate how I could be determined for children’s learning without determining what would be achieved. Analysis of how these principles functioned was articulated as a practical cycle of choice, reflection and collaboration. This cycle ensured that the principles were shared within the community. The notion of attentiveness to imagination was developed to articulate how I worked to create and sustain an inclusive environment for learning. Attentiveness was used to reflect the necessary constancy of the process of teaching and learning. Imagination was used to articulate how the process of recognising children’s individuality was achieved by connecting their past, present and future lives, acknowledging how possibilities for learning were created by building on, but not being constrained by what had come before.

The aim of this qualitative study was to explore young children's digital media practices at home in Azerbaijan. Five families, each including a five-year-old child, participated in multiple case studies over a period of 15 months in 2018-2019. The study generated data through a total of 15 family visits in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, and the use of 'living journals', a method developed for this purpose. Given its focus on the everyday lives of children, the study is informed by ecocultural theory, but also draws on the concepts of prolepsis and parental ethnotheories. The research questions were: 1. How can we explore young children's digital media practices within their family context? 2. How does the family influence the child's digital media practices? 3. How do parents mediate their young children's digital media practices? The study addressed the first research question through the development of the living journals method. This method facilitated a remote exploration of children's daily lives: mothers were initiated as proxy researchers, thereby decentring the researcher in the data generation process. Families commented both on the completed journals relating to their own child, as well as those created by other participant children. The journals existed in both physical and digital formats, and were a source of visually rich multimodal, multivocal, metatextual, and multifunctional data. This approach constitutes a valuable methodological contribution to the range of options available to researchers who want to study everyday lives from afar. Research questions two and three have led to three main empirical contributions. First, the living journals method revealed fathers' views on digital media and the extent of their involvement in their children's digital media practices. The findings demonstrated fathers' considerable influences on their children's practices as they were authoritative figures at home. Parents assumed different roles in mediating children's digital media practices, with fathers being active in setting rules but mothers more involved in the day-to-day management of these practices. Second, the case studies showed how family context influenced children's digital media practices. This included parental preferences for the availability of certain types of devices and the language of digital media content to which children were exposed, as well as mothers' attempts to balance being a 'good' parent with managing relations with each other, their children, and extended family members. Third, a new parental mediation strategy was identified and termed as 'subterfuge'. Subterfuge relates to restricting young children's uses of digital technologies indirectly by shifting the blame onto inanimate objects. This strategy was contextual and situated, and was typically established by fathers but executed by mothers.

Over the past two decades, the concept of creativity has gained prominence in educational policies, exhorting nations to engage with learners in order to cultivate innovative citizens with a potential to produce new ideas or solutions through school education. Despite much attention to teachers and schools' roles in teaching for creativity and creative teaching, teachers' understandings of the concept of creativity and the support they receive in relation to creativity is in sufficiently explored. This research aimed to explore the ways in which student teachers perceive and engage with creativity during a period of intense professional identity (re)construction at Initial Teacher Education (ITE) stage. With an instrumental case study approach, this study looked into a one-year Professional Graduate Diploma in Education (PGDE secondary) programme (2017-18) provided by a university in Scotland, where student teachers in English and Mathematics, along with a few tutors, were key participants on the aforementioned ITE programme. Drawing on narrative identity theory, this study conceptualised teacher professional identity (TPI) as being narratively constructed, a dynamic process of constructing and reconstructing professional identity throughout a teaching career. A conceptual framework named Narrative Identity Network Theory (NINT) was formed to explore two groups of student teachers' emerging TPIs in relation to creativity. This case study involved two semi-structured interviews with nine English student teachers and five Mathematics student teachers. It entailed holding interviews before and after the last school-based placement during the ITE year. Additionally, one semi-structured interview was given to four ITE course tutors in the same PGDE (Secondary) programme. The research involved the latter in teaching these students and sought their views on the place of creativity on their programme along with their engagement with the current cohort of student teachers. This was followed by the collection of supplementary data from field notes on classroom observations of the university-based ITE courses and key documents of ITE in Scotland. The findings gave rise to certain narrative construction and reconstruction of student teachers' professional learning experiences. Through NINT, three interconnected clusters of narratives emerged: the individual cluster comprising understandings of subject specialism, subject learning and teaching pertaining to creativity drawing on life experiences; the relational cluster consisting of narratives on student teachers' relationships with significant others (e.g. pupils, tutors from university and tutors from school placements) specifically during the ITE year; and the contextual cluster, which constituted student teachers' engagement with the concept of creativity and key changes to their professional learning occurring in the context of the PGDE (Secondary) programme provided by one Scottish university. Conclusions draw attention to the complexity of creativity in classroom teaching and learning, particularly in Mathematics, a stereotypically less creative subject. With a focus on student teachers' TPIs during ITE, the study discussed multifaceted influences on student teachers' conceptualisation of creativity and their engagement with creative teaching, teaching for nurturing pupils' potential as creative learners, and creativity embedded in their understandings of the subject and themselves as professional teachers. This study argues that the process of student teacher professional learning at ITE stage could be perceived as a creative process in six aspects.