Objectives In this paper, I explore engagement with one community over more than 3 decades. Conceptualising communities and institutions, including schools, as places, and classrooms as spaces (Massey, 2005) I follow my own work - first as a teacher some 30 years ago and more recently a researcher in this one community. Researchers involved in qualitative case study or ethnographic research are increasingly interested in thinking about ways to engage in ethnographic research in current times. Different researchers (e.g., Priessle, 2011; Weis, 2004) have suggested approaches to dealing with these temporal issues, however there is limited research that has conceptualised longitudinal ethnography and the possibilities of returning to the field (Henderson & Woods, 2016). This presentation will consider the affordances of returning to the same community to engage and re-engage with people, materials, texts, resources and literate lives over time. Methodology The paper presents data from a series of school reform projects which have focused on the provision of high equity, high quality literacy pedagogy to students living in communities of high poverty. The projects have been located in a variety of schools in this one community, but the entangled research relationships that develop over time as students become teachers and parents, and teachers shift across schools are important to consider through a lens of reciprocity and ethics. Data includes interviews and surveys with leaders, teachers, children and community members, classroom observations, the products of literacy teaching and learning, and data collected by teachers and researchers as they engaged in design-based research projects. Sociomaterial understandings allow me to consider the materiality of learning to be literate in current times and within particular educational spaces. By considering the data collected over different projects the point is to trace how community and researcher understandings and social practices develop over time and place. Findings The reflexive focus of the analysis involves articulating innovative methods for understanding literate lives within communities. Over time I have increasingly based my thinking in Donna Haraway’s (2015) notion of a curious practice (developed through her interpretation of Despret’s thinking with). To ‘go visiting’ into the literate lives of others has required me to suspend what I thought I had learnt about this community through long term engagement. This reconsideration provides new insights into the capacities of people to learn literacy, and the place of quality literacy pedagogy in ensuring equitable access to the benefits of being literate.

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