This proposal arises from our ESRC funded ethnographic study, Promoting Social and Educational Inclusion through the Creative Arts. The study seeks to elaborate how a creative arts programme in an inner city primary school contributes to social inclusion by building identities and communities. In the UK, commissioned research has often focused on broad brush notions of effectiveness in classrooms and schools. Our own starting point is that understanding inclusion necessitates looking closely at context: that is, what happens in a specific school, to specific groups of children, working with particular teachers, on particular tasks and projects. It also requires detailed investigation of the ways in which adults and children interact and the resources that both bring with them. We believe that inclusive pedagogies will be those which seek to draw upon the family and community knowledges and experiences of children in order to build the academic dispositions and capabilities that count and are counted. Our study is located in a well regarded primary school in a low-to-middle income area of a Midlands city. The school has a long history of engagement with the arts and the headteacher has made no secret of her concern about the policy imposition of literacy and numeracy hours in primary schools. The school has maintained a strong literature and arts based approach to language and learning. The staff has put considerable effort into ensuring that the school is innovative, responsive to children's needs, stimulating and inclusive. They have seen the recent UK policy initiatives to strengthen the arts, creativity and partnerships as opportunities to develop further activities they think are important to education in general and inclusion in particular. After an initial pilot which involved interviews with 54 children, analysis of their artwork and a small number of observations, the funded project has entailed regular observation of artists working with children; interviews with artists, teachers and children; analysis of a range of texts and images, including children's paintings, sketch books, displays and photographs. Our corpus of data includes field notes, transcripts and video which we use to try to capture how pedagogies are enacted as social, spatial and cultural practice. The proposal will explore various issues in the production, analysis and representation of the data and the ethical questions that underpin the research process, as well as presenting some findings in progress. The first paper concerns the use of visual methods in ethnographic research, particularly the use of video and photographs. It explores the ethical, practical and methodological implications for the researcher, the various participants and the school as an institution. The second paper presents some findings about the pedagogic identities and practices of artists working in teaching roles in the school and relates these findings to the professional identities and practices of the teachers. The third paper explores issues of representation and ethics through the consideration of an experience with an arts project which, it seems, everyone would rather forget about. Paper 1: Visual methods in researching the arts and inclusion; possibilities and dilemmas Lisa Russell The use of visual methods has become increasingly significant to ethnographic research. This paper explores the ethical, practical and methodological issues that arise from the use of video and photographs working within a primary school context. Visual images provide key contributions to the understanding of the arts, inclusion, pedagogy and identity formations and revelations. The use of video and photography open up possibilities for ethnographic research; they provide another form of gathering data and help inform our understandings, analysis and dissemination of results. But such methods may also present challenges concerning the technological and analytical skills of the researcher, the researcher's role and the impact upon the participants' position. Implications for the researcher, the teachers, the artist, children and school as an institution are investigated and illustrated by examples taken from the field. Paper 2: Teaching like an artist: inclusion and the pedagogic identities of artists in schools Christine Hall In this paper we discuss the pedagogic identities of practising artists working with 9-11 year olds on arts projects focused on place and self. Our analysis draws upon field notes, interviews with the artists and teachers, and videos of interactions between the artists and the pupils. We use Bernstein's later work on pedagogy, control and identity (1996 and 1999) as a theoretical framework for our argument. Specifically, we employ Bernstein's model of centred and decentred pedagogic identities as a means of thinking about the differing resources teachers and artists use to construct institutional pedagogies, focusing particularly on the different relation of teachers and artists to the 'official knowledge' of the mandatory curriculum and the local funds of knowledge within the school community. Our interest is in what we can learn from this analysis about the development of more inclusive pedagogies; the opportunities and constraints presented by current (UK) policy emphases on creativity, enjoyment and engagement, and the potential of creative arts programmes to enhance pupils' learning, build social and cultural capital and contribute to educational and social inclusion. References Bernstein, B (1996) Pedagogy, Symbolic Control and Identity: Theory, Research and Critique London: Taylor and Francis Bernstein, B (1999) 'Official Knowledge and Pedagogic Identities' in F Christie (ed) Pedagogy and the Shaping of Consciousness London: Cassell Paper 3: An arts project failed, censored or…? Representational dilemmas in a policy blind spot. Pat Thomson When a successful primary school engaged a pair of writers to work with children on an arts project, they thought that the result would be a lively, publishable product. When the writers worked with the children, they thought that they should use the children's experiences and ideas as a basis for meaningful and engaged composition. However, the result was a text which the school head-teacher felt would bring disapproval from parents and possible adverse publicity. The head refused to publish but continues to worry about this decision. The artists describe the project as one that 'failed'. In this paper, we suggest that this 'problem' was caused by the blindness of the arts funding policy makers towards the marketised context in which schools operate. But of more significance to us as researchers are the practical and ethical dilemmas of representation. How might we tell this story in ways that might help funder, artists and head teacher to move beyond thinking that this was a project they would rather forget?