Preparing professionals to listen to and respond to children's voices in a university course: Using the Mosaic approach.

It is envisaged that the Mosaic Approach (Clark and Moss, 2005) will explore how to listen to young children’s views and experiences of their outdoor environment as well as demonstrate young children’s competencies in expressing their perspectives. The individual pieces of the Mosaic approach include: observation, photographs, book making, tours and map making. As the project progresses it is hoped that new individual pieces may be added to the Mosaic approach. There are few studies that see children as active participants in research, but rather subjects of research. This approach may be methodologically challenging however Thompson (1992) and Rudduck (2001) both identified that young children are capable of insightful and intuitive analysis of their experiences of learning in schools and are able to understand the research process if presented to them in an age appropriate manner.