Interview: Alison Clark - pioneer of the Mosaic approach

A second edition of the best-selling book Ms Clark, senior lecturer in childhood studies at the Centre for Childhood Development and Learning at the Open University, co-wrote with Peter Moss in 2001, Listening to Young Children: The Mosaic Approach, is published this month.

She pioneered the Mosaic approach, which offers a creative framework for sharing young children's perspectives through a range of methods including child-led tours, map-making and working with children's photographs.

What changes have been made to the second edition of Listening to Young Children: The Mosaic Approach?

Listening to young children has continued to be an important issue in policy and practice despite many changes in the field. The revised edition of the book presented an opportunity to step back and re-examine the initial study, while providing new readers with some pointers as to how this work has been adapted by myself and others. The main body of the text has not been changed, as the research still remains important and relevant. To update the book, we have included short case studies of how the Mosaic approach has been adapted by practitioners. These demonstrate how the approach can be used in a range of early years settings to show that the framework is not limited to one environment.