‘Exploring the “Construction” strand in the Irish Primary School Visual Arts Curriculum through the Forest School approach’

Forest School is a concept, or intervention to traditional educational settings, backed up by research and built upon long-standing theories that children engage with nature naturally and that learning becomes more relevant to the student when they can relate it to real life scenarios. This research documents the implementation of the Irish Primary School Visual Arts Curriculum through Forest School, specifically, the ‘Construction’ Strand. The research was a qualitative inquiry that was supported by an action research methodology. It was conducted over six weekly sessions. Key findings show the development of a sense of responsibility, resilience, independence, happiness in a sense of achievement and an awakened awareness of the child’s own surroundings. The findings advocate the benefits of implementing this approach to enhance the Primary School Visual Arts Curriculum, as well as promoting happiness and contentment in the remainder of the day at school in other curricular subjects. .     

‘A guided walk in the woods’: boundary crossing in a collaborative action research project

This article discusses the ideal and practice of collaboration in a collaborative action research project in which university researchers work together with staff from the field of primary education. A qualitative case study was conducted using the theory of boundary crossing to make sense of the ways collaboration took place within the project team. The main theme, also a major dilemma in the project, referred to the transition from a democratic towards a more directive approach within the project design after the first year. The members of the project team took shifting and ambivalent positions within the project as they were trying to cross boundaries between the different goals of the project. Also, boundary objects on different levels contributed to the collaboration. We conclude that clear boundaries between groups or a strong shared identity, as proposed by an insider–outsider model of action research and the notion of first-order democracy, are not helpful in complex collaborative action research projects. Instead, we need the development of second-order democracy means in order to cross boundaries and sustain a critical dialogue about differences.     

‘Reading’ the nursery classroom: A Foucauldian perspective

This paper examines ways in which styles of language usage mediate attempts at describing classroom practice. The authors' particular focus centres on discursive power and they seek to illustrate some of the effects and consequences of applying certain Foucauldian concepts and analytical procedures within depictions of interactions between children and with the teacher in a nursery classroom. The paper begins by introducing an example of children's play. To this are applied analyses which stem from readings of Foucault. In so doing, it is shown how power both permeates and defines subjective positionings and where, as a consequence, individuals experience themselves as both powerful and powerless. A second example is offered in which a teacher talks to a child. The authors' analyses of this can, they believe, be perceived as a reflexive act, where the teacher's own beliefs, including her feminism, are critiqued and redefined.     

Individuating ‘sparks’ and ‘flickers’ of ‘a life’ in dance practices with preschoolers: the ‘monstrous child’ of Colebrook's Queer Vitalism

ABSTRACT

What are the dominant images of the Child in contemporary Western societies? In order to challenge some dominant images of the Child, this essay explores the possibilities of analyzing an experimental dance practice with preschoolers aged 1–2 years with Claire Colebrook's theorizing on ‘the war on norms’. Colebrook suggests a Queer Vitalism to push the limits of how to understand humanness generally, and more specifically, how to understand processes of subjectification. She moves from a post-structuralist understanding toward the Deleuzian notion of practices of individuation and processes of becoming-imperceptible. In this essay, we draw on Queer Vitalism to show how it is possible to understand children's constructions of subjectivity in events of experimental dance practices for preschoolers. The analysis is performed in close interactions with video-films from these workshops transformed to still photography. We aspire to show how these practices can be understood as counter-power strategies in the enactment of an image of a Monstrous Child. Such an image might transform the taken-for-granted image of the Child and preschool practices in subversive ways.     

For the Honour of the School: Class in the Girls’ School Story

This article explores the constructions of class in British girls’ school stories. Feminist scholarship has, to some extent, reclaimed the school story, pointing to the widening of acceptable gender roles for female characters in girls’ school stories, compared to their counterparts in mixed-gender stories, and indeed real life. While the limitations of this middle/upper class milieu have been noted, they are less often explored. I use readings of Bourdieu as applied to femininities by scholars such as McRobbie and Skeggs to examine how the lived experience of class can trouble the status quo. School stories often limit encounters with working-class characters to servants, recipients of patronage or straightforward threats. However, in Brent-Dyer’s A Problem for the Chalet School (1956) a working-class character enters the school on her own terms. Her presence sparks the reaffirmation of the expectations for successful upper-class femininity.     

The complexity of morality: Being a ‘good child’ in Vietnam?

In this article I examine what it means to be a good child in Vietnam. Throughout the country ancestral worship is widely practiced. This traditionally places emphasis on the need for a boy child to continue the practice of worship into the next generation. Because of this, while the high value placed on the boy child has been tempered by the influence of communist rule and modernity, the eldest boy still often holds preferential status. Under such circumstances the good child is one who accepts his or her position within the hierarchical structure of the family and is also willing to subjugate his or her individual needs to the greater collective good. This might manifest itself in a child’s ‘choice’ to work on the streets so that their earnings can be sent home to support other siblings through their schooling. Or it might show itself in the practice of children accepting and apparently supporting that fact that they have been sent to an orphanage or ‘hidden’ so that a parent can try for more male children. It would be naive though to conclude from this that boys and girls are automatically raised within separate moral frameworks. Instead this article proposes that at the local level what it means to be a good child is even more complex because the notion of the good, moral and filial child is shaped as much by family circumstances and expectation as it is by the mores and values of the wider society.     

Investigating the curriculum through assessment practice in higher education: the value of a ‘learning cultures’ approach

It is widely acknowledged that the curriculum and knowledge in higher education (HE) are especially visible through (and often constructed by) assessment practices. If this is the case, it matters greatly what perspectives and theoretical tools are brought to bear on the task of understanding these practices. Having briefly set out three perspectives on assessment in HE (the technical, humanist and interactionist), this paper introduces a ‘learning cultures’ perspective, drawing upon the work of Bourdieu, developed as part of a recent research project on English Further Education. The application of this perspective in HE is introduced through a vignette outlining a recent assessment episode and notes on how it may be explored. The paper argues that whilst some contemporary work on HE assessment incorporates elements of a cultural perspective, there are potential practical benefits to a more thoroughgoing adoption of a ‘learning cultures’ approach.     

Parent–School Partnership Formation through the School Council in Korea

Official involvement of parents in school education has been very limited until recently within the highly centralized educational administration and school management system in Korea. But, the educational reform in 1995 has brought fundamental changes in educational administration and school management system of Korea. The main approach of the reform is decentralization, which tries to turn over the power of the central government in educational administration and school management to the hands of regional education offices and site schools. According to the reform, the school council was introduced to enforce autonomous and responsible school-based management through broad participation of various stakeholders of education. In this article, I examined the background, roles, and characteristics of the school council, focusing on the new pattern of parent–school participation formation. And based on the findings, I discussed the issues of parents participation and future prospects of the school council and suggested policy implications for better implementation of parent–school partnership through the school council.     

Producing the ‘international’ child: negotiations of language in an international preschool in Japan

This article provides an ethnographic account of an ‘international preschool’ in Japan, describing how ideologies of ‘English’ and ‘internationalism’ are produced and consumed among the parents, teachers and directors, in their common goal of socialising an ‘international’ child.     

Developing mathematical ability in primary school through a ‘pull-out’ programme: a case study

This article reports the findings of a case study which examined a pull-out strategy for provision for mathematically able children in a primary school in London. The research investigated how the needs of a group of pupils, identified as able mathematicians, were being met through a special small group that works outside the regular mathematics lessons. Based on the observations of the lessons and the semi-structured interviews with both the pupils and their teacher, this article presents some interesting and useful ways for teaching mathematics to able children through small, pulled-out classes.     

Discourse in a small class: the ‘diverge-converge pattern’ and ‘relaxed freedom’

In an attempt to uncover differences in student behavior as a function of class size, the author observed a small class and a large class for 15 hours each and conducted interviews with eight students who were members of both classes. Two trends emerged from these qualitative data. First, a ‘diverge-converge’ pattern was evident in the small class (absent from the large class) in which students were much more able to get back on task after becoming off-task or off-topic. Second, the atmosphere in the smaller class was more relaxed and had a very conversational tone.     

‘The Rag-bag of All the Subjects’: English in a London Grammar School, 1945–1963

Evidence from a recent study of English teaching in three London schools in the post-war era suggests that changes to curriculum and pedagogy, commonly attributed by historians to the 1960s, were well underway in the 1950s. Major changes associated with ‘New English’ occurred when teachers began taking the lives and experiences of their pupils as material for English lessons. However, changes in an all-boys grammar school followed a different path. Using oral history methods combined with mixed documentary evidence (including teachers’ records and pupils’ work), we reconstruct the experience – the aims and beliefs – of a left-wing grammar school teacher, and we show how, under the influence of F. R. Leavis and the Scrutiny movement, he made response to literature a central activity at a moment when the place of English was uncertain, and the subject lacked academic prestige.     

Fostering children’s relationship with nature: exploring the potential of Forest School

Forest School offers children opportunities to explore the natural environment regularly over an extended period of time. It is based on six key principles, one of which states Forest School fosters a relationship with nature and develops long-term pro-environment attitudes through regular personal experiences in nature. We consider to what extent this aim is achieved by exploring the published evidence. We identify that a relationship with nature could be demonstrated under six themes although there is little robust evidence to support this. We suggest further research is carried out directly linked to this aim of Forest School.     

Boys’ educational ‘underachievement’ in the Caribbean: interpreting the ‘problem’

Education ministries in the Caribbean countries have directed considerable attention over the last decade to ‘solving’ the ‘problem’ of boys’ underachievement. Rather than considering such interventions, our central concern in this paper is to revisit debates about the interpretation of the issue, to explore whether boys’ underachievement is indeed a ‘problem’, in the sense of both an empirical reality and an issue requiring political attention. In this paper, we explore contestations over the reality and complexity of educational underachievement and whether this relates to broader political–economic marginalisation (or privileging) of boys. We turn then to explore the relationship between material realities and gendered subjectivities. Overall, we argue that boys’ underachievement should neither be ignored nor be the exclusive focus of attention and that a move from ‘boys’ underachievement’ to a broader analysis of ‘gender and education’ is needed, to place the debate in a gender relational context.     

Limitless provocations of the ‘safe’, ‘secure’ and ‘healthy’ child

This paper arose amongst the making and showing of a film and questions whether there are possibilities for interrupting powerful discursive frames that work at producing ‘the normal child’. Traditionally there has been a lack of interest in the use and critique of visual culture in educational research. Perhaps this lack of interest provides fertile opportunities to know something of the structure of education as a discipline, the rules that structure it and its deep grammar; it may also open up opportunities for disciplinary boundary-crossings where fields that embrace visual culture, such as photography and filmmaking, can bring their playfulness across binaries, including notions of certainty/ambivalence, to qualitative research in education. By turning to art theory, our aims are to interfere with our utopian longings that steadfastly cling to educational notions of the child.     

‘Row,row, row your boat’: singing,identity and belonging in a nursery

The concept of belonging is widely recognised as a fundamental part of human development and a key element of early childhood curricula. The research presented here explores the role of singing in the development of children's sense of belonging in a day nursery for children aged from six months to two years. The research design incorporated ethnography and portraiture, an approach to narrative inquiry. Data were collected over seven months, with the researcher adopting a participant observer role during regular visits to the nursery. Observation and interpretation of singing focused on relationships between children and adults and between peers. Themes of identity, togetherness, intersubjectivity and communicative musicality were identified in the analysis of data. The portrait shows the intrinsically interactive nature of singing, providing rich evidence of ways in which singing both supports and reflects the children's relationships and hence their sense of identity and belonging. This research contributes to literature on the musical lives of infants and toddlers that supports the value of music, especially singing, in early childhood.     

Understanding ‘Together and Apart’: a case study of Edward’s explorations at nursery

Edward was one of 58 children studied by workers and parents as part of a study on Well‐being and Resilience at the Pen Green Nursery. Within the larger study, eight children were studied in greater depth in order to explore connections between cognitive and emotional development. Schematic theory and attachment theory were used as frameworks for analysing the observations. Video observations were made over a period of 18 months. These were viewed and analysed by a researcher, Edward’s mother and Edward’s Key Person in the nursery. Edward found separating from his mother extremely painful and repeatedly used his play with objects to explore ‘separation’ and ‘connection’. It is argued that children’s repeated actions may be prompted by current emotional needs and that links can be made between children’s schemata (repeated patterns of action) and emotional development by drawing on psychoanalytic theory. The author also acknowledges the novelty of this approach for her, as a teacher, although these kinds of interpretation are common within the fields of play therapy and psychotherapy and are used increasingly in education.     

Reimagining gender through policy development: the case of a ‘single-sex’ educational organisation

In 2005, a feminist educational organisation in the USA for young women, ages 14–21, adopted a policy in order to clarify their target constituency of girls and young women. The policy defined ‘girls and young women’ not as a designation associated with fixed biological sex, but instead as a self-determined identity label creating an explicit policy of inclusion to gender non-conforming students, including transgender youth, who self-identified as ‘girls’ or ‘young women’. This article traces the series of influences that prompted the development of the policy, as well as the learning curves for this feminist educational all-girls’ community, and the discussions that led to both the unanimous adoption of the policy and a subsequent larger cultural shift within the organisation. This analysis seeks to add to an understanding and exploration of policies that address the de facto exclusion of gender non-conforming, intersex, and transgender youth from gender-based educational settings.     

Ages and ages: the multiplication of children’s ‘ages’ in early twentieth-century child psychology

This paper explores the trend, between 1905 and the late 1920s in UK and US child psychology, of ‘discovering’, labelling and calculating different ‘ages’ in children. Those new ‘ages’ – from mental to emotional, social, anatomical ages, and more – were understood as either replacing, or meaningfully related to, chronological age. The most famous, mental age, ‘invented’ by Alfred Binet in the first decade of the century, was instrumental in early intelligence testing. Anatomical age triggered great interest until the 1930s, with many psychologists suggesting that physical development provided a more reliable inkling of which grade children should be in than chronological age. Those ages were calculated with great precision, and educational recommendations began to be made on the basis of these. This article maps this psychological and educational trend, and suggests that it cultivated a vision of children as developmentally erratic, worthy of intense scientific attention, and enticingly puzzling for researchers.