Students’ reproduction and transformation of norms incorporated into a programme for social and emotional learning

The present ethnographic study aims to explore how students reproduce and make use of a programme for social and emotional learning to create their own moral orders and routines for interaction in their local school context. The study demonstrates that the students made use of routines and norms conveyed by the programme to negatively position and exclude peers as well as to reproduce discourses of ‘blaming the victim’. The results highlight the inappropriateness of implementing a programme that strips emotions and behaviours of their meaning and that fails to situate emotions within students’ actual social and cultural contexts. The study demonstrates how such an approach relocates the responsibility for dealing with socially and culturally situated problems to the individual and denies teachers the opportunity to respond to problematic situations that give rise to emotions of anger and that emerge in social and cultural contexts at school.     

The rural-urban divide,intergroup relations,and social identity formation of rural migrant children in a Chinese urban school

Through ethnographic fieldwork conducted at a Beijing public school, this study aims to investigate how rural migrant children in China negotiate and construct their identity vis-à-vis the school’s local children. Building on social identity theory, this study reveals that rural migrant children develop a strong non-local group identity as a response to the Hukou-based social policy and the occupation-based social hierarchies in contemporary China. Such an identity helps migrant children combat a sense of inferiority that is reinforced by their daily interactions with the socially and economically more advantaged urban peers. However, this group-based identity forestalls intergroup contact and prevents the migrant children from successfully integrating into Chinese urban society.     

Bullying Prevention Strategies in Early Childhood Education

Bullying is a serious problem that affects the young children’s well being. Early childhood educators find it difficult to manage bullying in the classroom. Preschool is the first environment outside of the home setting where children encounter difficulties when they socially interact with their peers. Based on the principles of protecting and establishing a safe environment for all children, the purpose of this review is to present current empirical evidence about the nature and distinctive facet of bullying among preschool children. It defines both the concept of traditional school bullying and bullying in early childhood education, describes the social context of young children’s bullying, differentiates between bullies and victims in early childhood education, discusses the young children’s interpretations of bullying, describes the young children’s functions in bullying, and provides a rationale for the use of bully prevention programs for young children.     

Rethinking science education: Beyond piagetian constructivism toward a sociocultural model of teaching and learning

In the first part of the article I present an epistemological critique of forms of pedagogy founded on Piagetian constructivism. Despite the appeal of the notion that learners construct their understanding, I argue that constructivism is problematic because it ignores the subjectivity of the learner and the socially and historically situated nature of knowing; it denies the essentially collaborative and social nature of meaning making; and it privileges only one form of knowledge, namely, the technical rational. I then present a critique of active learning and student-centered forms of pedagogy. I argue that in our models of teaching we rely on too many unexamined assumptions from developmental psychology and we take for granted the problematic notion that children learn by doing. My central thesis is that constructivism is flawed because of its inability to come to grips with the essential issues of culture, power, and discourse in the classroom. In the concluding section of the article I present a preliminary account of a sociocultural approach to teaching and learning that takes seriously the notion that learning is situated in contexts, that students bring their own subjectivities and cultural perspectives to bear in constructing understanding, that issues of power exist in the classroom that need to be addressed, and that education into scientific ways of knowing requires understanding modes of classroom discourse and enabling students to negotiate these modes effectively so that they may master and critique scientific ways of knowing without, in the process, sacrificing their own personally and culturally constructed ways of knowing.     

Minority young men’s gendered tactics for making space in the city and at school

This article draws on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews to explore young minority men’s relation to school and city space in Helsinki from the perspective of their everyday experiences of racialisation in public spaces. The article uses the concept of ‘power geometrical’ relations of space by drawing on several research traditions, including youth and masculinity studies, studies on social space, racialisation and ethnicity, and human geography. The evidence shows the school to be an important site of local and national power geometry (Massey, D. [1994]. Space, Place and Gender. Cambridge: Polity Press), in which ‘informal’ and ‘physical’ spheres are dominated by peers and connect to streets and public spheres (Gordon, T., J. Holland, and E. Lahelma. [2000]. Making Spaces: Citizenship and Difference in Schools. Houndsmills et al. London: MacMillan Press Ltd). The article shows how young minority men knew their place both in narrow local power geometries, and within the wider city and school spaces, exploring how they formed their own lived spaces (Lefebvre, H. [1991]. The Production of Space. Oxford: Blackwell), claimed their spaces and marked their spaces with diverse tactics. Some tactics were socially open, such as making friends; some were very mobile, such as claiming their own urban spaces by mobility, or marking and ‘hanging around’; and some involved big groups of friends, crowds, defence and embodied accounts.     

Designing pedagogic strategies for dialogic learning in higher education

This article focuses on the pedagogic value of dialogue to strengthen pre-service teachers’ reflective practices and improve their knowledge about the power of talk for learning. Dialogic learning was introduced to a unit of study taken by a final-year cohort of students in an initial teacher education degree at an urban university in Australia. Various opportunities for dialogue were designed into the unit through blended learning such as face-to-face tutorials, social networks and Viva Voce contexts. In the face of mixed opinion on their efficacy, the author profiles the use of social networks as a means of incorporating more interactive discourse through Web 2.0 platforms in higher education. The mixed-methods study reports on data collected from focus group interviews run at the end of the semester. An analytical framework based on Alexander’s principles of dialogic learning is used to interrogate the data set. The results illustrate the positive impact that dialogue employed as a pedagogic tool had on the value students perceived of their learning experience. It is recommended that designs for learning in higher education incorporate iterative exchanges across a variety of blended learning contexts to encourage productive interactions between students, peers and tutors.     

The mall,the library and the church: inquiring into the resourcing of early learning through new spaces and networks

Early learning has increasingly been the focus of social policy and programmes with a proliferation of public, community and commercial entities entering the field of production. Understanding this phenomenon requires educational researchers to conceptualise early learning both within a globalised network of circulating commodities and within specific situated spaces of local sociocultural practice. This paper describes how a research project has drawn on geosemiotic and actor-network theories, and employed spatially sensitive methods, to investigate the resourcing of early learning in spaces new to most educational researchers. Focusing on the suburban field site ‘Midburb’, we analyse the ways in which discourses operate through/in place producing different entry points, pathways and access for parents, impacting on their opportunities for encountering early learning resources.     

Using Facebook groups to support social presence in online learning

Building interpersonal connections in asynchronous online learning is important, but it is harder to achieve compared to face-to-face learning experiences due to its mostly text-based nature. Facebook is a popular social media platform and has been used as an outside-class communication space in formal learning contexts to supplement cognitive and affective aspects of learning. In this study, we used Facebook groups as supplemental social spaces in two asynchronous online master’s-level courses to understand if it impacted students’ perceptions of social presence (i.e., copresence, immediacy, and intimacy), learning interaction with faculty and peers, as well as sociability of the online learning environment. The results indicated that students felt more positively about social presence and learning interactions with other classmates and their instructor and perceived the course as having more sociability after they joined the class Facebook group. Findings have implications for supporting social impression formation in online learning.     

Making connections and making friends: social interactions between two children labelled with special educational needs and their peers in a nursery setting

This paper reports on a pilot study of the social interactions between two children labelled with special educational needs and their peers in an early years setting. Data from play observations and staff interviews are used to examine the dynamics of friendship groups that the two children have developed and the way that they attempt to make new connections with other children. Comparisons between the two children’s interactions with their recurrent playmates and less familiar peers are drawn and the significance of their agency in making decisions about developing relationships is highlighted. A theme that also emerges is that staff facilitating rather than directing interactions between the two children and their peers has the most positive impact. Areas for further investigation are suggested including the range of relationships that children identified with special educational needs establish with their peers and the nature of adult support that most effectively supports friendships between all children.     

Effects of learning styles on learners’ collaborative patterns in a mobile-assisted,Chinese character-forming game based on a flexible grouping approach

This paper reports a novel, mobile-assisted, game-based learning design for Chinese character learning. In playing the ‘Chinese-PP’ game in a 1:1 (one-device-per-student) setting, each of the 31 target students in Primary 3 (9 years old) is assigned a Chinese character component. A student may make use of his/her own and peers’ character components to form a legitimate Chinese character, and invite the peers with matching components to join his/her group. The intention is to assist the students in developing general orthographic awareness (understanding the structures of Chinese characters) through social negotiation. In this paper, the students’ collaborative learning processes in three game sessions were analysed. The relationships between students with varied learning styles and their game behaviours and learning gains were unveiled as a result. Through the Chinese-PP learning activities that stimulated active peer coaching and social learning, we found that all the target students became active learning participants and achieved high learning gains in the last game session. Recommendations for the future development of such a novel learning approach will also be given.     

Learning through teaching: Peer-mediated instruction in minimally invasive education

The current paper provides insight into the learning strategies adopted by children working at Minimally Invasive Education (MIE) Learning Stations. Previous research has clearly indicated the attainment of basic computer literacy by groups of young children in the age groups of 7–14 years. This learning takes place due to the emergence and development of group social processes, an aspect crucial for achieving basic computing skills. The paper describes the process of socially shared understanding and learning as being crucial to individual learning. It is to be noted that this approach of socially shared learning does not challenge the analysis of the individual level of processing; it maintains that individual learning is vital in any learning context, but insufficient to build the psychology of learning. MIE research is of the view that young children learn through interaction with others, particularly peers as it provides an important context for social and cognitive learning. For it is in this way that children make sense of their own experience and environment. Hence, schools are not the only privileged sites of learning.     

Evaluating teacher and learner readiness to use Facebook in an Australian vocational setting

There has been a progressive move towards the adoption of social media in formal post compulsory learning. This qualitative study evaluated the readiness of teachers and students to use Facebook to enhance learning in a tertiary vocational setting in Australia despite a lack of support from the institute. Readiness was understood to be the balance sought between potential energy available (power) and the energy required for change (load). The findings, from surveys and focus group interviews, show that students were much more likely than teachers to have a Facebook account and to be interested in using Facebook as part of their learning. Agreed benefits, evident through a student-initiated closed Facebook group, included collaboration through sharing resources, knowledge and ideas, increased communication with peers and teachers, and a platform that was familiar to students. The difference lay in perceptions of purpose, places and spaces for learning, and an understanding of social norms.     

A comparison of students with learning disabilities to low achieving and higher achieving students on three dimensions of social competence

Research continues to accumulate attesting to the fact that many children with learning disabilities are experiencing social difficulties in school. Nonetheless, it is also clear that achievement deficits, with or without the presence of a handicapping condition, are also related to social problems in the classroom. Several studies attempting to clarify the relative roles of handicapping condition and achievement in social adjustment have produced mixed results. The purpose of the present study was to clarify this issue further by examining the social differences between elementary school students with learning disabilities and other low achieving and higher achieving children on three social dimensions: sociometric status, behavior as rated by teachers, and self-ratings of social competence. The results indicated that the children with learning disabilities may be a higher risk socially than their low achieving and higher achieving peers. Variables that may account for these results are discussed as well as directions for future research.     

Pupils’ Learning,Identity and Social Context: the case of Mary∗

ABSTRACT

This paper provides an analysis of social factors which influence the sense of identity and approach to learning of young children. The analysis is set in the context of a critique of national education policies which fail to appreciate the importance of the engagement of learners in learning processes. However, it focuses at a more detailed level on the social dynamics between children and parents, siblings, peers and teachers and the ways in which these evolve over time and influence identity. A model of key factors and processes is presented which draws on both symbolic interactionism and social constructivism and its use is illustrated through a detailed case study of the learning of one child over a three‐year period.

     

Art-informed pedagogy: tools for social transformation

How might an arts-informed pedagogy in a leadership development programme work to inspire, create and educate the leaders needed for creating more socially just and inclusive communities? This self-study explores how a post-secondary educator has integrated arts-informed approaches to teaching and learning in a leadership development programme at the University of Victoria, BC, Canada. Theories of arts-informed learning, pedagogical ambiguity and productive practices inform and situate my approach to engaging adult learners in aesthetic processes of reflexivity, emphasising the situated, inter-subjective and contextual nature of socially just knowledge construction. The article outlines five arts-informed pedagogical strategies described as ‘designs for provocation’ to explore how these aesthetic approaches support the development of creative and emergent leaders and commitments to social justice. It concludes by exploring the promise and limitations of the approaches discussed.     

Making sense of theoretical frameworks and methodological approaches: Exploring conceptual change and interest in learning from a sociocultural perspective

Educational psychology has a tradition of considering learning and motivation in terms of the individual and individual functioning. Short-term intervention studies have been common and quantitative measurement of the causes and effects of variables has been the aim of much research. When a sociocultural approach forms the basis of research into psychological constructs, a reappraisal of the research aims and the ways in which data are gathered and analysed is necessary. If the underlying assumption is that learning and motivation are socially and culturally situated, the design of research studies needs to encompass participation in authentic and purposeful activities. In order to develop a rich sociocultural understanding of these constructs, qualitative research designs become increasingly important. In this article, we consider two current research projects, one focusing upon conceptual change amongst students in a first year university class, and the other a classroom-based qualitative study exploring primary (elementary) students’ interest in learning. In each project, data have been collected over time in relation to both social interaction and individual functioning in specific sociocultural contexts. Our frameworks for data collection and approaches to data analysis are discussed in this article, together with some of the issues which we have identified as problematic. In particular we are conscious of the difficulties associated with articulating and describing the nature of social and cultural contexts, especially those with which we are familiar, and of distinguishing their most salient features. We are also critically aware that because our research is situated within very familiar environments, we need to identify and explore our implicit assumptions about those environments and the ways in which our roles as teachers and researchers both coincide and occasionally conflict.     

New Model of Teacher Learning in an Online Network

While many researchers have examined teacher participation and professional development in online networks and communities, few have looked at the factors and contexts that shape how teachers learn in these online spaces. Examining teachers' learning processes within these online spaces can yield important insights for scholars, school leaders, and teacher educators who are interested in designing online networks and communities or supporting teacher professional development within these spaces. This study was designed to shed light on the multifaceted nature of teacher learning within an online network environment. Data were collected through an online survey and in-depth interviews of members in the Edmodo math subject community. A thematic analysis was conducted across the two data sets in order to identify patterns of actions and factors that shaped the participants' learning processes. A new model of teacher learning was developed to display teacher learning as an iterative, multistep process that is socially constructed, distributed, and situated in the contexts in which teachers work. Implications and ideas for further research are discussed.     

Links between empathy,social behavior,and social understanding in early childhood

The purpose of the current investigation was to examine both social behaviors (i.e., aggression, shyness-withdrawal, and prosocial tendencies) and social understanding (i.e., attitudes and responses to such behaviors in hypothetical peers) of empathic and low-empathic children. Participants were 136 children in kindergarten and grade one. Parents completed ratings of child empathy, shyness, aggression, and prosocial tendencies. Children were presented with vignettes depicting prosocial, aggressive, or shy peers, and asked questions concerning their understanding and responses towards these behaviors. Results indicated that as compared to low-empathic peers, more empathic children were reported to exhibit greater prosocial behavior and less aggression and social-withdrawal. In addition, empathic children demonstrated a more sophisticated understanding of shyness and aggression as compared to less empathic peers. These results suggest that empathic children are more socially sensitive, both in terms of their social understanding of others as well as their own social behaviors.     

The Utopianisation of Critique: the Tension between Education Conceived as a Utopian Concept and as one Grounded in Empirical Reality

Critique is a concept that is constantly used as an instrument for agreement or disagreement, for reflection and discussion. There is a difference, however, between critique as a historically grounded phenomenon and critique as a utopian conception not situated in any particular socio‐historical context. Educational theory resists reduction to empirical science partly because of its utopian character. Thus tensions that arise within it concerning its individual, social and emancipatory aims mean that it always has a double aspect of being both utopian and socially grounded at the same time. In general there is a tension within the practice of education between upbringing, on the one hand, and self‐emancipation on the other, which is reflected at the level of educational theory in the distinction between normative‐utopian and dogmatic‐empirical elements. Even a utopian critique, however, must make use of the social and historical materials available in order to function, and thus it becomes itself historically situated. This unavoidable situation is one that must be embraced by a self‐consciously utopian form of theorising. Just like other theories of society, the theory of education has two possibilities for self‐definition. It can be conceived of either as a utopian or as a factual theory. In the latter case, it follows social contingency passively, giving itself over to the ‘destiny of Being’ in order to await the ‘result’. But it can also be interested and take part in social processes, and thus contribute to the opening out of thought and culture to utopian considerations. Educational critique, even in the utopian sense, however, has to recognise its own dogmatic elements in order to function as critique. It is thus self‐evident that critique without dogmatism is not only impossible but also senseless. Similarly, educational dogmatism, although it apparently excludes critique by definition, must contain within itself the possibility of new forms of critique based on its own assumptions. Its very reliance on empirical methods to address the solution of unquestioned problems can itself subvert the dogmatic normative assumptions on which that empirical enquiry is based.     

Dealing with gender in the classroom: a portrayed case study of four teachers

This paper emerges from a qualitative case study that takes place in a US preschool setting and explores teachers’ influences on the construction of children’s gender identities. According to postmodern theories of gender, identity is constructed and constituted through social interactions and performances. This study focuses on the gender identities constructed as preschool teachers and students interact and learn. In this portrayed case study, we combine the methodological elements of case study and portraiture. Portraiture methods enhance the traditional case study process, authorising a more considered presentation of participants and context. Four teachers at one preschool setting are portrayed. Some of the findings include the teachers’ awareness of the importance of their interactions with students and the impact they have on students’ gender performances. We also suggest that teachers need more resources and self-awareness regarding their own gender performances; teachers’ self-knowledge may be important in disrupting gender-stereotyped teaching and social constructions, and in creating more inclusive learning spaces for all students.