Emotional Competence and Early School Adjustment: A Study of Preschoolers at Risk

This short-term longitudinal study examined whether emotion regulation and emotion understanding made unique contributions towards at-risk preschoolers' classroom adaptation. To address this question, we assessed children's emotion regulation and their understanding of emotions in both self (self-awareness, emotion coping) and in others (emotion recognition, affective perspective taking, situation knowledge). Participants were 49 children (22 boys and 27 girls) who attended a Head Start program for low-income children. Seventy percent of this sample was Caucasian, with the remainder being of Latino, African American or biracial ethnicity. Emotion regulation at the start of the school year was associated with school adjustment at year's end, whereas early emotional lability/negativity predicted poorer outcomes. Children who made a smooth adjustment to preschool also were better able to take another person's affective perspective and to identify situations that would provoke different emotional responses. Emotion regulation and understanding made unique contributions towards school adjustment, even when controlling for potential confounds, including behavior problems and verbal abilities. Teachers appeared to influence children's emotional competence by serving an important regulatory function, especially for older preschoolers at-risk.     

Friendship Quality as a Predictor of Young Children's Early School Adjustment

The purpose of this study was to develop a method for assessing young children's perceptions of classroom friendships and to determine whether these perceptions were associated with their adjustment during the transition to grade school. Subscales tapping 5 friendship processes (e.g., validation, aid, disclosure of negative affect, exclusivity, conflict) were extracted from a 24-item friendship interview that was individually administered to 82 kindergarten children ( M age = 5.61) who possessed a reciprocated and stable "best" friend in their classroom. Children's reports of the investigated friendship processes were found to be reliable, and processes such as perceived validation and conflict predicted children's satisfaction with their friendships, and the stability of these relationships. Perceived conflict in friendships was associated with multiple forms of school maladjustment for boys, including higher levels of school loneliness and avoidance and lower levels of school liking and engagement. For both boys and girls, validation and aid forecasted gains in perceived support from classmates, and aid also predicted improvements in children's school attitudes. Perceived exclusivity in friendships was associated with lower levels of achievement. These findings, and others reported in this article, are consistent with the hypothesis that the relational features of children's classroom friendships yield psychological benefits or costs (e.g., provisions) that, in turn, affect their development and adjustment.     

Nurturing learning or encouraging dependency? Teacher constructions of students in lower attainment groups in English secondary schools

‘Ability’ or attainment grouping can introduce an additional label that influences teachers’ expectations of students in specific attainment groups. This paper is based on a survey of 597 teachers across 82 schools and 34 teacher interviews in 10 schools undertaken as part of a large-scale mixed-methods study in England. The paper focuses on English and mathematics teachers’ expectations of secondary school students in lower attainment groups, and explores how low-attaining students are constructed as learners who benefit from specific approaches to learning justified through discourses of nurturing and protection. The authors argue that the adoption of different pedagogical approaches for groups of low-attaining learners to nurture them may in some cases be fostering dependency on teachers and cap opportunities for more independent learning. Furthermore, more inclusive whole-school learning-culture approaches may better allow for students across the attainment range to become independent learners.     

Bridging the Divides: The Need for a Pragmatic Semiotics of Teacher Knowledge Research

In this essay, we consider four approaches to research on teacher knowledge: the scholarship of teaching, action research and teacher research, narrative inquiry, and critical-cultural teacher research. Similarities and differences among these four approaches are highlighted. The most salient difference lies in the way each approach identifies different discourses as sources of distortion in teacher knowledge research. Although some divergence within a field of study can be a valuable source of debate and dialogue, we believe the differences identified here risk dividing the field of teacher knowledge research in unproductive ways. What is needed, we propose, is a semiotic theory that acknowledges the way teacher knowledge is irreducibly mediated by multiple discourses while preserving a commitment to the idea that individual teachers' experiences can be a source of novel and useful knowledge. We examine two semiotic theories — French poststructuralism and Charles Sanders Peirce's pragmatic semiotics — and critically assess how they might facilitate more constructive dialogue among differing conceptions of teachers' knowledge research.     

Teaching manfully? Exploring gendered subjectivities and power via analysis of men teachers’ gender performance

The notion that teachers’ classroom behaviour and interaction with pupils may be predicted on the basis of their gender underpins recent controversial campaigns to recruit more male teachers in the UK. Teachers’ performances of gender are explored in this article, which draws on three cases from a larger study to analyse the ways in which teachers ascribed male produced their gendered subjectivities in the classroom and in interviews. Findings highlight the extent of diversity in male teachers’ practice and in their constructions of gendered subjecthood, hence providing evidence to question assumptions that male teachers teach, or relate to pupils, in particular ways due to their identification as male. The analysis emphasizes the fluidity and complexity of gender, including the (novel) identification of ‘male femininity’ in male teacher performances. Yet while supportive of the argument that gender is not necessarily tied to sexed bodies, the paper illustrates how embodiment can constrain or facilitate access to, and exercise of, particular gendered discourses, with consequences for power positions. It also highlights how these processes can result in the consolidation of particularly powerful subjectivities, somewhat testing Foucauldian perceptions of power as ‘never localized’. Hence the paper presents a challenge both to education policy makers and to theorists of gender and power.     

Gender,popularity and notions of in/authenticity amongst 12‐year‐old to 13‐year‐old school girls

This paper draws on data from a research project investigating gendered identities and interactions of high‐achieving students in Year Eight in England (12–13 years old), particularly in relation to students’ ‘popularity’ amongst their peers. As part of this study 71 students were interviewed from nine different schools in urban, rural and small town locations. From an analysis of participants’ conceptions of the characteristics of ‘popular’ and ‘unpopular’ students, this paper looks in depth at notions of in/authenticity and how it is perceived and judged in relation to the self and others. In particular, the paper focuses on the genderedness of such discourses of in/authenticity as constructed by these students, and relates such concerns to theorizations of ‘impossible’ femininity.     

The misallocation of students to academic sets in maths: A study of secondary schools in England

Drawing upon data gathered from 9301 Year 7 students (12–13 years old) from 46 secondary schools in England, this study represents the first larger-scale attempt to compare their actual set allocations in maths with the counterfactual position where their allocation to sets is based solely on their prior attainment at the end of primary school [using their Key Stage 2 (KS2) fine-grained scores in maths]. Through such an analysis, the study found that nearly a third of students (31.2%) had been misallocated to lower or higher sets than their KS2 results would have warranted. Beyond this, school setting practices were found to exacerbate differences in set allocation in relation to gender and ethnicity, but not socioeconomic background. The odds of girls being misallocated to lower sets in maths than their prior attainment would warrant was found to be 1.5 times higher than that for boys. Similarly, the odds of Black students being misallocated to lower sets was 2.4 times higher than for White students, whilst the odds of Asian students being misallocated to lower maths sets was 1.7 times higher than for White students. The article concludes by reflecting on the significant role that setting by attainment in secondary school can play in exacerbating already established patterns of educational inequalities in gender and ethnicity.     

The simultaneous production of educational achievement and popularity: How do some pupils accomplish it?

In spite of research showing that pupils—particularly boys—tend to experience tension between high academic achievement and popularity with peers at school, some pupils continue to maintain simultaneous production of both. This article focuses on a sample of 12–13 year‐old pupils, identified as high achieving and popular, to examine classroom subjectivities, with attention to their practices around gender and educational achievement. Data are drawn from a qualitative study funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, which involved observation of classes at nine different co‐educational state schools in England, and interviews with 71 high‐achieving pupils, including 22 that were identified as high achieving and popular. The study findings belie the notion that high‐achieving pupils necessarily jeopardise their social standing with classmates. However, it also demonstrates the importance of embodiment and even essential attributes in productions of subjectivity that successfully ‘balance’ popularity and achievement. Nevertheless, high‐achieving and popular pupils are shown to undertake significant identity work, employing particular gendered performances and practices in order to maintain this simultaneous production.     

Talking back to power: snowballs in hell and the imperative of insisting on structural explanations

This viewpoint explores and shares our experience of ‘doing’ feminism in the context of its apparent ‘demise’. We were recently invited to attend an event at the Cabinet Office, to ‘discuss the impact aspirations and expectations within the community have on the educational achievement of young people in deprived areas’. The seminar was entitled, ‘Expert Seminar with the Minister for the Cabinet Office: Community Aspirations and Educational Attainment’. Appalled, both at the grammar (!), and the deficit account implications underpinning the Cabinet Office Invitation, we made contact with one another, and agreed that we would attend the seminar with the specific intention of challenging this discursive premise. We seek to use this Viewpoint to reflect on the experience in relation to academic activism and ‘speaking back’, as well as to take the opportunity to re‐state a few of the key points that detonate the deficit discourse in relation to the educational attainment of working‐class pupils.