‘We understand better because we have been mothers': teaching,maternalism, and gender equality in Bolivian education

This article explores Bolivian schoolteachers’ attitudes and practices surrounding gender in the context of a national educational reform law that mandated gender equity. Teacher interviews and primary school classroom observations indicate teachers’ discourses and practices reflect a sometimes paradoxical blend of advocacy for gender equality and reinforcement of existing traditions of patriarchy. Specifically, long-standing cultural assumptions that essentialise women's maternalism were common within schools and supported by both teachers’ attitudes and classroom practices. While this served to reinscribe gender inequality and women's subordination, teachers’ discourses also drew upon ideals of maternalism as a basis of women's strength and empowerment in opposition to sexism. In this article, we explore the tensions that arise as teachers negotiate their own staunch support for girls’ rights alongside their assumptions about gender differentiation.     

Hill girls,consumption practices,power, and city style: raced and classed production of femininities in a higher education setting

This study investigated the ways a diverse group of university women in the USA utilised racialised and classed discourses of femininity in the creation of subjectivities. Interview and focus group data were collected over a two‐year time period and focused on how women navigated the higher education setting. Two forms of femininity, ‘Hill girl’ and ‘City style’, were salient. Hill girl femininity was based on markers such as white skin that had been tanned, and consumption practices. City style femininity was also defined through consumption practices and identification as a woman of colour. Material markers like race and class both limited and expanded the discourses available to women. New subjectivities were created with particular rights, while simultaneously making them subject to policing. The women in this study used contrasting and, at times, contradictory discourses to explore various forms of femininity that were connected to institutional power and privilege.     

The preschool bathroom: making ‘problem bodies’ and the limit of the disciplinary regime over children

In this paper we study the effects of power in a bathroom, which is a rarely analysed space in preschools, using empirical examples from a semi-ethnographic study conducted in New South Wales, Australia. We demonstrate that educators’ understanding and practices mostly consider their own positioning in discourses and come short in accounting for children’s practices in and expressed views on the bathroom. Educators also remain distant from children’s bodily experiences. The interplay of the open architectural design of the bathroom space and dominant discourses operating in the preschool constitute some children as ‘problem bodies’ apparently requiring (and justifying) direct intervention. Following this reasoning we argue that the surveillance, regularisation and normalisation in the bathroom is far from total, which leads us to question the adequacy of understanding the bathroom as forming a part of a modern (disciplinary) institution.     

Len Barton,inclusion and critical disability studies: theorising disabled childhoods

Len Barton has pioneered the sociological study of education in the areas of disability studies and inclusive education. This paper addresses an argument developed by Len Barton that social exclusion, of which disablism is one element, (1) has many compounding forms of differing exclusions, (2) is not a natural but a socially constructed process, (3) has no single factor that can remove it and (4) is in constant need of conceptual analysis. Our paper aims to address each of these four challenging themes in relation to the contemporary societal position of disabled children, their families and key professionals that work around them, with a specific focus on schools. First, we explore the ways in which disabled childhoods are imbricated with other forms of exclusion. Second, we consider the ways in which ‘disability’, ‘impairment’ and ‘child’ are consistently being reproduced in particular and often contradictory ways by disability discourses. Third, we consider the need to work with numerous forms of educational intervention that address the exclusion of disabled children. Fourth, we conclude with an appeal to develop disability studies in ways that build on the shoulders of (social model) greats – such as Len Barton – whilst being receptive to other transformative perspectives from queer, feminist and postcolonial studies.     

Latinx* popular culture imaginaries: examining Puerto Rican children’s social discourses in interpreting telenovelas

Abstract

In this paper, we present a collaboration project within one urban Puerto Rican classroom, focused on constructing a critical literacy inquiry curriculum grounded in the students’ out-of-school literacy practices in their communities, including their experiences with media and popular culture. We focused on a critical literacy and media inquiry unit centered on the students’ self-selected subject of the telenovela. Here, we examine one student’s work to highlight two overarching findings: (1) the visibility of the students’ complex understanding of the media landscapes in telenovelas, particularly the construction of dominant social discourses across telenovela worlds, and (2) the ways that bringing children’s mediatized cultural imaginaries in their creative work supports an approach to literacy in classrooms, where explorations of discourses of power emerge from the students’ knowledge. In order to articulate how children actively examine and construct discourses across multiple social worlds, we examine these findings using the Four Resource Model, and elements of discourse analysis, as theoretical and analytical frameworks, focusing on the construction of identities, worlds and meanings in relation to the social discourses of telenovelas.     

Affect and counter-conduct: cultivating action for social change in human rights education

This paper explores the entanglement between two partially connected concerns that offer the potential to animate current discussions on human rights teaching and learning: ‘affect’ and ‘counter-conduct’. Both terms are at the heart of human rights education (HRE) approaches that aim at cultivating resistance in children and youth so that they respond in critically affective and action-oriented ways to human rights violations and social injustices in ‘the everyday’. These concepts are used to explore: first, how to encourage children and youth to enact forms of counter-conduct that are critical in human rights struggles, rather than responses which are sedimented through the governing technologies of declarational approaches of HRE; and second, how these counter-conduct practices may constitute ethical and political practices that critique liberal and sentimental forms of affect about human rights violations. It is argued that theoretical insights that pay attention to counter-conduct and affect offer possibilities for reconsidering normalized ideas in HRE.     

Genre and activism: Schools, social movements, and genres as discourse conduits

This article examines the literacy practices of three school-based student activist groups: a Gay-Straight Alliance, a high school chapter of Amnesty International, and a human rights club unaffiliated with Amnesty. Specifically, this article investigates how members of the different groups advanced their projects by repurposing school genres such as hallway bulletin boards and office memos. By articulating movement messages in school genres, it is argued, activists tightened their schools’ connections to social movements and circulated movement discourses through school space. After findings on each group are presented, the concept “genre as discourse conduit” is induced from the data and is used to reevaluate the nuances and implications of students’ efforts to articulate movement discourses in school genres. Equipped with this new concept, researchers may better analyze activist groups’ efforts to perform movement work in schools.     

Exploring British Pakistani mothers’ perception of their child with disability: insights from a UK context

This research lends insight into disabling discourses on South Asian families of children with disabilities. It explores immigrant Pakistani maternal understanding of their children's disability, uniquely through an educational perspective, highlighting maternal roles which schools must acknowledge to improve outcomes for children. The findings of this research, supported by a literature review, highlight various ideological threads shaping maternal understanding of disability and their children's schooling experiences. Data were collected through multiple case studies of immigrant Pakistani mothers of disabled children at Westchester School, incorporating semi‐structured interviews and reviewing pupils’ school files. After a process of open coding, the main themes emerging from interviews suggested maternal perceptions of disability evolved from a medicalised lens, onto identifying with structural barriers to children's progress, and a gendered lens. Both maternal perceptions and their professional interactions determined maternal accounts of their children's schooling experiences. This research highlights positive familial factors shaping maternal understanding of disability, supporting further studies into maternal advocacy and empowerment within UK special education.     

Can teachers disrupt their professional identity and enable Children’s participation? Comparing teachers’ and municipal officials’ work with students in democratic spaces

This paper explores how teachers conceive and facilitate children’s participation in student councils, by comparing their conceptions and practices to those of municipal officials operating a municipal children’s parliament. Findings from an exploratory case-study suggest that the latter, guided by citizen consultation discourse, view children as municipal citizens and treat them as adults. In contrast, teachers, guided by pedagogical ethics and protectionist developmental discourses and approaches, treat children as adults-in-the making unprepared for full participation. This divergence, we argue, offers insight into the difficulty teachers have disrupting their professional identity to enable children an equal voice in democratic spaces. This difficulty is compounded, we show, by the complexity of facilitating children’s participation in the hierarchical setting of the school.     

Scaramouche Goes to Preschool: The Complex Matrix of Young Children’s Everyday Music

This article examines everyday musical practices and their connections to young children’s learning and development, in and through music. It begins with a discussion of music learning in early childhood as a form of participation and levels of intention in learning. Next, conceptions of child that have dominated early childhood music education discourses are discussed, along with other factors that are known to influence children’s musical lives, such as spatiality, repertoires and the politics of participation. Three illustrative vignettes that stem from the author’s experience as an early childhood music educator and researcher are presented throughout the text. Implications for early childhood education are outlined at the end.     

‘It’s never okay to say no to teachers’: Children’s research consent and dissent in conforming schools contexts

This article examines the limits to children giving research consent in everyday school contexts that emphasises their conformity to comply with adult expectations, and highlights children’s competence and agency in navigating this conformity through different practices of dissent. It draws on research into children’s agency, using a multimodal ethnography of Year 1 classrooms in two English primary schools. The article includes a reflexive methodological focus, exploring the extent to which I counter the schools’ emphasis on conformity. This includes creating visuals for children to practice consent; positioning myself as the researcher in a non-teacher role, as ‘least adult’ and the one who ‘least knows’; and designing interview spaces markedly different from classrooms. The article examines how children navigate conforming discourses by finding different ways to dissent in the research. Firstly, children demonstrate a sophisticated awareness of the cultural norms of indicating refusals beyond saying the word ‘No’. Secondly, children achieve unnoticeability, by which they absent themselves from the ‘on-task’ classroom culture, and by extension the research process. Thirdly, they engage in playful dissent, demonstrating their political knowingness of the classroom social order. The article discusses the implications for educational research when the values of consent are in conflict with a schooling focused on conformity. This includes emphasising the limits of consent procedures, paying closer attention to how researchers recognise and respond ethically to children’s multiple practices of dissent, and using research to disrupt problematic power structures in education settings that limit possibilities for children’s consent.     

Maintenance and non-maintenance of community language in immigrant families: the case of Polish parents in the UK

ABSTRACT

This paper examines Polish immigrant parents’ perceptions of their community language value, the factors that shape their approaches to children’s language education, and the different outcomes on the spectrum of language maintenance/non-maintenance they achieve. It focuses on the empirical findings and interprets them with reference to Bourdieu’s theory of practice. It argues that a better understanding of migrants’ diverse experiences can be aided by an analysis of capital interactions and transformations in response to the socio-cultural environment. At the same time, it suggests that the negative impact of anti-migration socio-political structures and discourses on language practices should not be assumed.     

Advocating a Post-structuralist Politics for Educational Leadership

Abstract

Post-structuralist discourses have usually been associated with forms of critique and deconstruction of social, cultural and philosophical phenomena. However, this article attempts to provide a generative approach to understanding educational leadership through Michel Foucault’s notions of power and subjectification, and Judith Butler’s notions of performativity and discursive agency through re-signification. We argue that leadership is not simply a list of traits, characteristics or behaviours to be implemented. Rather, we argue that leaders are performatively constituted through everyday practices and discourses. The aim is to interrupt prevailing discourses that often re-inscribe certain forms of meaning and understanding in educational leadership. This disruption subsequently provides possibility for putting forward otherwise silenced ideas about what leadership is and how leadership ‘identity’ (subjectivity) is formed, thus expanding the methodological tools scholars can use to talk about leadership.     

Bringing the jellyfish home: environmental consciousness and ‘sense of wonder’ in young children’s encounters with natural landscapes and places

The over-arching aim of this study was to elucidate and interpret topics that are relevant to how we understand children’s experiences and creation of meaning in natural landscapes and places within these landscapes. Following two nature-kindergarten groups regularly over ten months, the data for this ethnographic study consist of constructed narratives and narrative maps. Key topics relate to children’s multi-sensory experiences and the development of environmental consciousness, and their ‘sense of wonder’ as a driving force for exploration, interpretation and creation of meaning. Implications of the study for discourses of environmental education in the early years and local practices of taking children into nature are also discussed.     

‘I don’t want to catch it’. Boys,girls and sexualities in an HIV/AIDS environment

This paper examines young South African school children’s understanding of HIV/AIDS. Based on ethnographic work in two schools in Greater Durban, it explores the impact of HIV/AIDS on the ways in which gender and sexuality are articulated against the backdrop of race and class specific contexts. The first part of the paper examines the children’s discourses of sex, sexuality and HIV/AIDS. We show that young children’s meanings of sex, sexuality and are not straightforward and are actively produced and defined through a range of social processes. These processes shape the extent to which young children experience sexuality within discourses of fear and pleasure. Young children’s meanings of HIV/AIDS are explored in the second part of the paper. Here we show how their knowledge of HIV/AIDS is socially structured through class/race and gender and these forms of social relations provide the framing and reference points for children’s constructions of meanings around HIV/AIDS. We finish the paper by raising some theoretical and practical/political questions about the implications of what we have found for HIV/AIDS education in South Africa.     

Recognition,inclusion and democracy: learning from action research with young people

ABSTRACT

This paper draws upon learning from three action research projects conducted as part of a Europe-wide project exploring young people’s social and political participation. Challenging dominant discourses about what ‘counts’ as participation and what does not, the paper explores how, through the action research projects, young people engaged in knowledge democracy in ‘new democratic arenas’. Building upon experiential knowing and creating knowledge and learning through practice, the young people explored their own democratic knowledge production, communication and engagement within a context of shifting discourses of participation, democratic engagement and active citizenship. The increasing preference of young people for more informal forms of participation as lived practice reflects a shift to young people constructing their own modes of participation and ‘remaking democracy’ in their own vision and according to their own needs. By working outside of the confines of normative assumptions of democratic practice and participation, young people exercised their own ‘political’ agency in response to their own priorities, interests and concerns and, in doing so, illustrated that new forms, understandings and practices of knowledge democracy can emerge that reflect the promise of inclusive democratic societies more meaningfully.     

Between urgent and lifelong matters: overweight children’s voices on health promotion pedagogies

ABSTRACT

This article addresses the learner perspective on being overweight by listening to 39 Danish overweight children aged 8–13 years. In accordance with the existing critique of the ‘obesity epidemic’ and medico-scientific discourses around food and exercise, this article explores how new health imperatives shape overweight children’s self-narratives. Health pedagogical activities in Denmark are between urgent and lifelong approaches to achieving health, and the article presents overweight children’s voices on having to learn new health behaviour in between these two schisms. From a social constructionist and post-structuralist perspective, the analysis demonstrates how the children both subscribe to discourses of discipline and control over health actions, as well as legitimate narratives of having to adjust, accommodate and negotiate health challenges to everyday life practices. The article addresses what can be learnt from listening to overweight children’s voices in the context of performing meaningful health pedagogies.     

Mischief-making of one kind/and another: unruliness and resistance in rural preschoolers' free play

While many contemporary popular cultural discourses in the USA recognise and commodify children as distinct persons engaging in the middle-class project of expressive individuation, much public and early educational policy has simultaneously intensified the control and regulation of children, children’s culture and children’s bodies and emotions in early education settings. Prout suggests that late modern schooling might be characterised by ‘practices directed at greater surveillance, control and regulation of children’ (304). This ethnographic study of a group of three-, four- and five-year-old children in a rural New England community preschool setting explores rural children’s lived experiences resisting control and navigating contradiction through unruly, mischievous games and free play. This unruliness is situated in the context of escalating academic demands in early childhood education and resistant rural community culture(s).     

Developing glocally informed diversity and equity discourses: examining inequity via autobiographical reflection

This study responds to the need for glocally informed discourses on diversity and equity that draw upon internationally situated, local narratives to contribute to larger analyses. Such work is vital so that cross-national educational discourses do not become infused with PISA score comparisons or globally dominant perspectives alone. This local qualitative case study employs narrative inquiry with observation and document analyses to examine one accomplished multicultural teacher educator’s US-based practice. This study demonstrates the benefit of engaging teachers in autobiographical reflection as a supportive precursor for appreciating and learning from students’ diverse backgrounds, and critically analyzing societal inequities, such as the institutionalized use of inaccurate or incomplete text-based narratives. Promising practices are offered for how teacher educators across international settings might help teachers to navigate complex personal and institutional spaces while working to ‘reconstruct society toward greater equity in race, class, gender, and disability’.     

The social construction of urban Fijian childhoods: literacy teaching, Waka readers and children’s lives

The article draws on the elements of poststructural theory to explore the mismatches and alignments in language and literacy teaching discourses in urban Fijian primary schools. More specifically, it compares the liberal progressivism of whole language and literacy pedagogies with the culturalism that informs a key reading resource in the teaching of literacy and language. The constitution of urban Fijian childhoods emerging from these two major discourses is then compared with several cohorts of urban Fijian children’s own accounts of their lives. Major discursive mismatches and alignments between these discourses and the children’s own expressed life ways are noted. Where alignments exist between sets of discourses, children’s language and literacy development are more likely facilitated. However, where mismatches occur, there are implications not only for children’s effective language and literacy learning but also for more equitable access to language and literacy pedagogies for all Fijian children.