This is the first in a series of interviews with researchers whose work has made a difference in the area of early years education. Sarah Boyd interviews University of Waikato Emeritus Professor Jane Ritchie. Jane Ritchie recalls driving around in a van collecting children from their homes to go to the early childhood center she ran as part of a postdoctoral research project in the 1970s. The aim was to try to meet the particular needs of Maori children, as well as to research different teaching methods and curriculum approaches. They'd had a grant to buy the van and it proved essential. Sometimes the child would be hustled out the door by their parents almost in their pajamas, she says. Books were central to the project: each child was given a book bag and books to take home. Almost none went missing, and when the children went on to school, teachers reported they made a beeline for the book corner. At the time, Jane was on a fellowship with the newly established Centre for Maori Studies and Research at the University of Waikato, after a 14-year period as a full-time mother. She documented the work in the books Chance to be Equal (1978) and Tamariki Maori (1977). Though the project was not duplicated elsewhere it was influential, with former Secretary of Maori Affairs Kara Puketapu acknowledging its role in his thinking about the development of the kohanga reo movement. It is an early example of the many ways in which Jane Ritchie has been a powerful advocate for children and young people throughout her life. Her background and expertise are in psychology rather than education, but across the wide range of work she has been involved in, the concerns of women and children have always been central. The work of her and her late husband James Ritchie has had a lasting impact. Strong family influences are woven through Jane Ritchie's work. Her father, Ernest Beaglehole, was New Zealand's first professor of psychology. His early interest was anthropology and with his wife Pearl and later his family in tow, he carried out fieldwork with Hopi Indians in Arizona, fieldwork in Hawaii, Tonga and the Cook Islands and, in the 1940s, a study of a Maori community in Otaki. In a presentation in 1990, Jane said: My parents worked together, so they provided models of an anthropological couple, sharing academic goals, a pattern I was later to repeat with my own husband. From my early experience in Otaki, I learned about the existence of another culture, an experience I would not have obtained living in Karori, a white middle class suburb in Wellington. My mother was a very outspoken and forthright woman, someone who had opinions and whose opinions were respected by my father. Jane began a degree at Victoria University intending to major in history but after her first lecture in psychology, she knew she'd found her subject. Some of her earliest fieldwork was in Murupara alongside James Ritchie, whom she went on to marry in 1956. The focus of the Murupara research was the first 5 years of life, and she interviewed mothers of preschool children about their experiences, hopes and expectations: We used to sit on the riverbank and chat--we didn't tape anything. That work led to her PhD topic, which focused on Maori women and probed the differences in lifestyle between those who were still living in more traditional communities and those who were in more scattered, urban settings. …