Life in the Classroom and Playground

The Accounts of Primary School Children

Bronwyn Davies

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781138220928
• eBook ISBN:
  9781315411637
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This study, first published in 1982, approaches children from an ethogenic viewpoint. It records their own accounts of their social world and sees them as members of a distinct culture with its own perspective, code of behaviour and strategies for making sense of their lives. The author suggests that teachers who can take the pupil's perspective into account will work together more successfully with these pupils in the process of communicating their adult knowledge to the children. This title will be of interest to students of sociology and education.

1

Introduction

Overview

Children have been written about from many perspectives, and for a multitude of purposes. Rarely have they been asked to speak for themselves, though their written work is sometimes taken seriously enough (see, for example, Dunkle and the Children’s Panel, 1979, and for their traditional literature see Opie and Opie, 1959, and Turner, 1969). But children are generally not asked to make an account of the social world as they perceive it. To approach children from an ethogenic orientation, and to ask them to give an account of their world, involves taking children more seriously than we have been used to doing, as people with a perspective of their own and strategies of their own for dealing with the social world that they perceive; as people who have, in fact, a culture of their own.

A variety of social scientists, in various parts of the world, have commenced this task of gathering accounts from children concerning their particular perspectives and strategies in relation to the social world.*

A common thread running through the work of each of these authors is the idea that children interpret the world differently from adults, not because they have not yet learned to see the world ‘properly’, but because they are viewing it in their own terms, terms which some of these authors have come to view as the culture of childhood.

This study seeks to extend the insights developed by these various authors and to do so in the Australian context with children of upper primary school age. That the children of the study are Australian and of an age group different from any of the children in the cited studies makes them, on the surface of things, quite different. Yet it will be apparent, as the work progresses, that there are many parallels in children’s culture in Australia, Britain and North America, and that being a child is more significant than belonging to a particular country or a particular age group, or even a particular social class.

The study is based on understandings derived from conversations that I had over a period of one year with a group of 10- and 11-year-old children. Our talk covered a wide range of topics. Amongst other things we talked about the people who mattered to them – friends, family and teachers, each of these becoming topics of conversation when they were problematic in the ongoing lives of the children, and slipping into the background taken-for-granted world when interactions with them flowed smoothly and needed no thought or attention. In this manner I discovered through the children’s accounts what was important to them, from their point of view.

This study has thus capitalised on the ability children have to make an account of their experiences. It has moved from children’s interpretations of their experiences in school to adult interpretations of that talk and those experiences.

But the study does not deal solely with children’s talk about their experiences. Because they came into the interview in groups they brought their social world with them and that social world became an observable part of the talk. They talked to me about their interactions and they interacted with each other and with me at the same time. The interviews were, in an important sense, not separate from life as the children knew it; they were life, brought into the interview room from the classroom and the playground. My own children further provided an interactional forum for the development of my thinking about the children at school.

My research experience was one of listening, observing, and interacting with children, of developing through these experiences with children an understanding of the particular perspectives children bring to their interactions with each other and with adults. Chapter 2 deals with the methodology which makes such a study possible.

In Chapter 3 I look at the social location of children and the contextual framework of their accounts. I will examine the interactions I had with them in terms of how we each cued into the other’s world and found an appropriate and workable system of interaction.

In Chapter 4 I use the discussions I had with the children about friendship to demonstrate the centrality and power of childhood culture as it applies to the children’s interactions with one another. Why they are so important to one another, how they influence one another and why and how they interact in the ways they do are the central themes of this chapter. In many ways, this is the most challenging piece of analysis, for it involves understanding those aspects of the children’s world to which I am not privy and yet which, I feel, are central to their construction of the world. Here there are no adults to call the tune and no dominant adult culture to which they must react. This is the world of children where their own cultural meanings, standards, rules and beliefs are established and maintained.

In Chapter 5 I analyse the strategies the children use for making sense of and coping with the adult world. The children’s world is presented in this chapter as one with its own pragmatic philosophy. The integrity of children’s culture, often difficult for outsiders to comprehend, is comprehensible if studied from the insiders’ point of view. The effects of continued contact with the more powerful adult culture, and the forces which maintain the separate children’s culture are discussed. One of the purposes of this chapter is to throw some light on classroom processes by looking at these processes from the children’s point of view. The knowledge children bring to adult-child interactions is different from that brought to their shared culture, and it is different again from the knowledge adults bring to adult-child interactions. Though adults may assume a reciprocity of perspectives when they interact with children, it is clear if one listens to children that this is a somewhat fallacious assumption. The tasks which face children in the classroom, as Hargreaves (1975, p. 144) has pointed out, are different from the tasks facing adults. Where tasks differ, perceptions, understandings and strategies will differ also. School for children, then, need not necessarily be about teachers and how to cope with them. That was an early assumption I had to overcome. The following conversation is an amusing example of questions asked from my adult perspective (which assumes that school is about teaching and learning), and answers given from the children’s point of view:

Transcript 1.1: Henry, Sally and Garry*

B.D.: OK now Henry, tell me what you think of the class you’re in.

Henry: Oh, I like it better than any other school. Except for X School.

Sally: Erh – that’s awful.

B.D.: Did you go to X School for a while?

Henry: No, I never went there but my brother went there.

B.D.: What do you think would be good about X School?

Henry: ’Cos they buy icecreams, lollies, scrummos.

Garry: Not scrummos!

B.D.: Don’t you have those at the tuckshop here?

Sally: But you’ve got to eat them before you go to class! (indignant – in ref. to X School)

B.D.: What do you like about this school, Henry?

Henry: You can just about do anything.

Garry: Oh/

Sally: You get more things here.

B.D.: Let Henry tell me will you?

Henry: You know them iced coffee, strawberry milk and new packets of chips, nut chew, oranges and apples. (Other children interject or amend this food list, all talking at once and with great enthusiasm)

In the year of my study, however, teachers did become problematic because the children had to learn to cope with a succession of very different teachers whose views of the teaching-learning process differed quite markedly from one to another. The children found themselves continually stressed by their inability to get on with their teachers, and so teachers were often the subject of our talk. Under more ‘normal’ circumstances the children may have found little to say about the classroom and the teaching-learning enterprise since not only is this aspect of schooling generally considered by children to be part of the teacher’s rather than the pupils’ responsibility, but most of what happens in the classrooms is taken-for-granted, unproblematic and not in need, therefore, of further attention and analysis.

In the Conclusion I look at what is to be gained by studying children from their own perspective. The study of children’s culture has direct implications for adult-child interaction and for teacher-pupil interaction in particular. I suggest that teachers who can take the pupils’ perspective into account will more successfully interact with these pupils in the process of passing their adult knowledge on to their pupils.

Autobiographical Note

C. Wright Mills declares that the authors of the best social science present themselves as people rather than as depersonalised automatons whose heavy style depends on some reified knowledge of ‘how it is done’. He says:

We must distinguish two ways of presenting the work of social science according to the idea the writer has of himself, and the voice with which he speaks. One way results from the idea that he is a man who may shout, whisper, or chuckle – but who is always there. It is also clear what sort of man he is: whether confident or neurotic, direct or involuted he is a centre of experience and reasoning; now he has found out something, and he is telling us about it, and how he found it out. This is the voice behind the best expositions available in the English language.

The other way of presenting work does not use any voice of any man. Such writing is not a ‘voice’ at all. It is an autonomous sound. It is a prose manufactured by a machine. That it is full of jargon is not as noteworthy as that it is strongly mannered: it is not only impersonal; it is pretentiously impersonal. Government bulletins are sometimes written in this way. Business letters also. And a great deal of social science. Any writing – perhaps apart from that of certain truly great stylists – that is not imaginable as human speech is bad writing. (1970, p.242)

My reasons for presenting myself as ‘I’ rather than as ‘the author’ stem not just from a stylistic preference, but from a recognition of the fact that the pragmatic nature of this study necessarily involves me as a person.*

To present the data as if I had not been involved would be to tell only part of the story.

In reading similar research, but without personal knowledge of the author, I have sometimes been bothered by lack of such knowledge and found myself turning continually to the dust jacket and the front pages of the book hoping to pick up some glimmer of information about the person writing that I may have missed on first perusal. The few biographical sentences which are sometimes to be found (aided by the occasional photograph) go some way to filling the vacuum, though rarely far enough.

Much about an author can be guessed at from the written style and from the content of the work. It is my wish to reduce the guesswork on this occasion by telling you something of myself and my background, such that I am clearly present in what follows.

I was born on 10 January 1945, the third child of a well-to-do solicitor in an Australian country town. I was raised partly by my mother, a quiet, shy, gentle woman of some ‘breeding’ though little education and by the succession of ‘maids’ who lived in and helped my mother manage our large and rowdy household. There were four of us: my older sister, much like Hartley’s Hilda in The Shrimp and the Anemone, powerfully stamped her model of the world on whoever would listen, and persecuted somewhat mercilessly those who would not; my older brother who attempted to solve his problems through systematic persecution of those he would love; and my younger brother who was a sometime delightful companion.

The most vivid feeling attached to my childhood was one of freedom. My father was rarely present. My mother believed that the old style of strict upbringing was wrong but could find nothing definite to take its place. She fairly steadfastly steered a course of non-interference and non-intervention in our lives and pursued her own interests instead. We were free to wander all day through the countryside, to read curled up in bed late into the night, to explore and develop close relationships with people outside and unknown to the family. Free to be quiet and to think, free to make mistakes, free to fight, and free to make reconciliation if we could. Sometimes I experienced freedom as lonely and frightening, since I seemed to be accountable only to myself. It grew upon me none the less as the only conceivable state of being, to be alone with my own consciousness yet open to close enduring relationships of my own making.

I was educated in a small Church of England private school for girls which was staffed by English, Australian ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The Research Act
• 3 The Social Context of Children
• 4 Friends and Fights
• 5 Pupils’ Attitudes to Teacher Organisation and Discipline
• 6 Conclusion: The Double World of Childhood
• Appendix 1 Unfolding Perceptions of the Research Act
• Appendix 2 Analysis of the Interaction between Language and Experience in the Making of Accounts
• Bibliography
• Name Index
• Subject Index