Probine, Sarah2025-05-142025-05-142024NZ International Research in Early Childhood Education Journal, ISSN: 2537-7191 (Print), 26(1), 14-29.2537-7191http://hdl.handle.net/10292/19199Teachers can be powerful influences on how young children experience the visual arts. It is often teachers who make choices about when, where and how children will experience the visual arts in early childhood education. This paper explores an interpretivist, qualitative research project that examined the visual arts experiences of young children (aged 3-4) at three early childhood settings in Auckland, New Zealand. This paper explores a portion of the findings, focusing on the experiences and visual arts pedagogies of the early childhood teachers who participated in this study. In response to the literature, which suggests that many early childhood teachers continue to experience uncertainty around their roles as teachers of the arts, settings where the visual arts were deeply valued within the curriculum, were purposively selected. The rationale for selecting settings that valued this domain was to determine what factors and choices had enabled these settings to develop a rich visual arts curriculum for children. The study aimed to discover what influences had shaped teacher’s visual arts pedagogies, and how this impacted young children’s learning through the visual arts. The research found that when teachers nurture their visual arts knowledge and confidence, both personally and professionally, they are equipped to engage authentically with children’s visual arts making and they make intentional and creative choices about visual arts curriculum and pedagogy.© 2002 – 2025 The OECE (& ChildForum). NOTICE: this is the author’s version of a work that was accepted for publication. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in (see Citation). The original publication is available at (see Publisher's Version)3903 Education systemsVisual arts pedagogyearly childhood educationco-constructionco-artistsJournal ArticleOpenAccess