ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on ethical issues of research with multilingual, multiethnic children in comparative primary education studies, and the practical actions researchers can take to generate meaningful data. It explores how newly arrived pupils from asylum-seeking families could demonstrate creative learning when the Scottish educational context, language and curriculum were all new to them. The research framework positioned creativity as being characterised by relevance, ownership, control and innovation. Field notes provided a crucial space for reflexivity, while extended engagement and dialogue with research participants allowed for some recalibration of the researcher-researched relationship and research which offered the potential for future impact on policy and practice. Methodologies which enable respondents to use forms of communication other than the written or spoken word were able to offer powerful insights into language usage and hierarchies which might never emerge in more traditional interviews.
