Today's learning objective is to have a party: playing research with students in a secondary school special needs unit

The use of creative methods has been advocated within disability and childhood research as a means of including voices of inarticulate participants in research, as it can support and supplement the use of conventional language. This paper draws on a research project aimed at designing ‘the best school in the world’ with five students in a special needs unit of a secondary school in a socially deprived community in England, to suggest the use of playful creative methods in generating and representing data in inclusive education research. Play, as an activity occurring in an actual social reality yet not completely governed by its rules, offers an interesting starting point for researchers interested not only in describing the existing world but also in imagining viable alternatives to it. This paper discusses how using a playful methodology had an impact on power relations and provided an accessible context to foster participants' engagement in reflexive discussions about social norms and values. Creative and playful methodology was also useful in transgressing the primacy of language in educational research, thus opening spaces for other aspects of experience to be included in the analysis. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at: http://youtu.be/Lt9l1eab6rQ .