In order to disrupt hegemonic thinking, the foundation of biases on which this thinking is built must first be confronted. I became increasingly aware of the detrimental impact of implicit bias during a research project I conducted in a children's literature course with preservice teachers. In this research project, I analysed the responses of the…

The reawakening of the Indigenous Gamilaraay language in northern inland New South Wales, Australia involves righting two centuries of prohibition and mistreatment after invasion by English-speaking settlers. Gamilaraay is no longer used as an everyday language in the community, although it has strong emblematic value for the Gamilaraay community.…

Towards the end of the first COVID-19 lockdown in early 2020, in Aotearoa New Zealand, the authors conducted a small-scale study to gain insight into children's responses to the pandemic restrictions. As it was not possible to interview children ourselves, we recruited parents to read a set of digital stories about a toy bear in lockdown to their…

New Caledonia is a French overseas territory in the South Pacific with a long history of differing attitudes towards independence (Fisher, 2019). The local government aims to challenge French cultural hegemony by building a "New Caledonian School" (Gouvernement de la Nouvelle-Calédonie, 2016). That is, a school in which students are…

Canadian multicultural picturebooks greatly influence both children's and educators' being and becoming. Identity is closely related to our engagement with literacy practices. In this article, two researchers who immigrated from mainland China engage in autobiographical narrative inquiry, a methodology that asks the researchers to self-face, and…

Arguably New Zealand's best loved picturebook author/illustrator, Gavin Bishop invariably challenges populist power structures in his fiction and non-fiction. As such, his books are ideal vehicles for teaching children about such broad topics as race relations, colonisation, migration, class conflicts, gender relationships, environmental issues…

"Best behaviour" picturebooks, also known as "making good habits" or "teaching good manners" picturebooks, have explicit educational intentions that imply a culturally hegemonic voice. Despite this problematic characteristic, these picturebooks are welcomed by both parents and the market in China. Using extant…

Children's literature is potentially a starting point to present critical multicultural concepts to young learners. It may also be a medium through which historical and contemporary ideologies of society are encouraged in the young learners. This process may be viewed as a form of cultural hegemony when the choices of literature and reading…

This article shares conversational research (Thomson et al., 2012) that we undertook with parents in one of children's primary education settings: the home. We investigated the question: what are the comfort levels of families, with young children, as they encounter picturebooks featuring diverse gender and sexual identities? Over the past 10…

Prevailing heteronormative discourses in early childhood education in Aotearoa New Zealand present difficulties for upholding the right of gender diverse tamariki ("children") and lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, intersex and queer-parented families to experience belonging in equitable, inclusive early childhood settings. The purposeful…

This paper reports how I addressed the issue of extensive missing values in my PhD study, "Digital Competencies of High School Mathematics Teachers". I collected data using an online survey. Several methods exist to address the issue of missing values. I utilised multiple imputation (MI) as it provides more accurate results. The mean…

Unexpected twists and turns on the PhD journey can be directly related to the research itself, while others are related to the experience of the journey. For me, the most unexpected aspects were related to my health and saw me transition from writing and typing to dictating to the computer. This autoethnographic article is based on the lived…

The global COVID-19 pandemic has severely hit the lives of the people of Nepal. The country witnessed two phases of lockdown over 10 months from March 2020 until August 2021. I completed my PhD data collection in Nepal through February to April 2021, when the pandemic's risk was naturally lowered. My research explores local value systems of…

Socialisation in doctoral education is a multifaceted process through which students acquire the knowledge, skills and values required to perform in a scholarly community. The literature reports numerous experiences of doctoral students, but socialisation and the challenges faced by international students has received limited attention. As an…

The final observable product of a successful doctoral programme is typically a thesis that has been critically examined by senior academics and considered to demonstrate a significant contribution to knowledge. However, it is a conviction underpinning this special issue that the doctorate should be acknowledged, explored and understood as a…