Sustainably 'we-searching' early childhood outdoor learning through visual technologies

This paper explores the ways in which ‘we-search’ (Vincent, 2021) as a pedagogic activity assisted by visual technologies, brought together academic research and practitioner enquiry within a collaborative ‘close to practice’ (Wyse et al., 2018) participatory action research project. ‘We-search’ regards individual consciousness as a social product (Vygotsky, 1978; Bakhtin, 1981) and provides a way for educators to ‘live within’ emergent findings as a way to explore the realities of their teaching existence. From a dialogic perspective, the multiple perspectives educators hold express differences or alternative expressions, yet there may not be awareness of them until they are uttered (Bakhtin, 1984). These utterances offer opportunities to elicit new understandings of the ‘self in practice’ (Cochran-Smith and Lytle, 1999) and to make meaning from these experiences. This paper shares the ways in which this sustainable methodological approach supported educators to raise their consciousness of outdoor teaching and learning practices.