Visiting borders in education: A creative approach with children in primary education

This study engages with children sharing experiences of belonging at school, of receiving access and of exploring complex relationalities along shifting borders in educational spaces. Their understandings offer a magnifying glass on normativity, difference and social positions in school spaces. Through ‘flattening and folding’ with material and theoretical concepts, the authors map how qualitative data images made by children and theory constitute one another to make sense of complex relationalities discussed by children. The project desires to make sense of blurry borders that exclude children in educational contexts and to push borders in methods and ethics in research with children.     

Perspectives of elementary school educators in Japan,South Korea,Taiwan and the US on disability,stigmatization and children's developing self Part 1: Defining the problem in cultural context

The stigmatization of individuals with disabilities is a widespread social justice issue. This paper introduces a study of disability, stigmatization and self for children with disabilities and their typically-developing peers. It is the first of two companion papers. It examines the problem of stigmatization from the perspectives of experienced elementary school educators practicing in diverse cultural contexts. We conducted cross-cultural analyses of individual, audio recorded interviews with 26 Japanese, 43 Korean, 16 Taiwanese and 18 US educators, including school social workers. Educators from all four cultural groups described disability and stigma as challenging children's development of self: children with disabilities may experience the self as isolated and inadequate, and typically-developing peers may experience the self as lacking culturally expected values of empathy and respect. Educators' understandings of children's experiences also were culturally nuanced. Educators variously described children with disabilities as experiencing a sense of not belonging [Japan], loss of motivation [South Korea], too much shame [Taiwan], and low self-esteem [US]. They variously described typically-developing children as challenged to show empathy [Japan], include children with disabilities in their peer group [South Korea], develop benevolence [Taiwan], and show respect for individual differences [US]. We contextualize educators' perceptions within their specific sociocultural-historical contexts. Our second paper will focus on solutions; specifically, educators' perspectives on how to minimize stigmatization and support the development of self for children with disabilities and their typically-developing peers. Together, these companion papers provide social workers with valuable perspectives for eliminating the stigmatization of children with disabilities in future generations.     

Making Schools Meaningful

Schools can offer a secure and personally meaningful environment which facilitates self development, as well as academic and social competence. The purpose of this article is to present a point of view about the meaning of schooling experience, particularly that of students and teachers. There is a need to extend and deepen understandings of the human context of education which significantly influences the meaning of school experience. The authors of this paper, an educator and a clinician, have come together around their shared commitment to furthering the growth of children and adolescents, and their common conviction that the complexities of contemporary schooling require a sharing of professional knowledge and insights.     

Classed,raced, and gendered biographies: young people's understandings of social structures in a boomtown

As young people attempt to adapt to a rapidly changing society, how they experience school and work has undergone significant changes in recent decades. Youth researchers attempting to understand these changes have drawn heavily on the concepts of agency and structure. In the process, researchers often end up taking a ‘middle-ground’ approach and in turn have critiqued the theorizing of Ulrich Beck for being too focused on agency. This article engages with this debate by examining young people's understandings of the social structures shaping their lives within the constantly changing environment of a boomtown. Drawing on qualitative in-depth interviews with high school students, post-secondary students, and young workers, it was found that most young people were able to recognize how class had shaped their lives, only Aboriginal young people discussed how race/ethnicity had shaped their lives, and only young women understood how gender had shaped their lives. The findings suggest that the specific local context that young people experience their school and work lives within is important in their reflexive understandings of their biographies. In this case, the boomtown environment helped to highlight difference and make only certain social structures visible to particular young people.     

Towards Extended Schools? How Education and Other Professionals Understand Community‐Oriented Schooling

The government in England is proposing that every school should offer extended services to children, families and communities. However, in the absence of agreed models of how such community‐oriented schooling should operate, its form will depend on how it is understood by the education professionals and their partners in other agencies who have to make it work in practice. This article draws on data from interviews with over 350 professionals to outline two such understandings. It suggests that they rest on different assumptions about fundamental social and educational issues and argues for a more open debate around these issues. Copyright © 2006 The Author(s). Journal compilation © National Children's Bureau.     

Understanding Bullying in an Affluent,Academically Rigorous U.S. High School: A Grounded Theory Analysis

Students and staff members from a U.S. high school were asked to discuss their understanding of bullying within the context of their school social environment. Findings from the grounded theory analysis suggest that understandings of bullying are socially constructed and that how bullying is understood is influenced by context and by the negotiation of identity within that context. Furthermore, subjects focused on drama, a form of social interaction considered far more common than bullying. Findings suggest that research on bullying may benefit from shifting its emphasis on defining bullying and establishing prevalence, to exploring youths' contextual and developmental perspectives.     

The Emotional Experience and Expression of Anger: Children’s Perspectives

The purpose of this study was to explore and identify key themes related to a child’s experience of anger. The existing literature on children’s emotional experiences stems from adult perceptions and interpretations; this study was envisioned to investigate the experience of anger among children using their own words. Furthermore, this study was designed to illustrate a contextual perspective of children’s emotional knowledge, so that teachers, social workers, counsellors and other child mental health professionals may be able to relate and interpret children’s emotional experiences. Participants were male and female students, aged 8–9 years and in a regular grade three classroom within a community school. Through the use of semi-structured interview focus groups conducted over a span of 10 weeks, participants were invited to disclose their understandings of anger and how they experienced it. Results were analyzed via a content analysis that resulted in five themes. These themes consisted of understanding anger, origins of anger, consequences of anger, regulation and resolution of anger, and finally relations with others. Results and implications of the findings were discussed.     

Theory,practice, and perspectives: Disability Studies and parenting children with disabilities

Abstract

In this process-oriented article, the authors weave short personal narratives with theoretical reflections to examine the relationship between Disability Studies scholarship and parenting children with disabilities. The authors present three findings: first, their position as parent-teacher-scholars informs their work in Disability Studies. Second, the work of Disability Studies scholars has the potential to positively influence parents’ understandings of disability; consequently, Disability Studies-informed parenting can influence parent advocacy for their children. Third, parent-scholars have the potential to create research that can positively impact parents, practitioners, and the field of Disability Studies. The authors conclude by arguing that there is a need for Disability Studies scholarship for and by parents. This work is significant because it challenges divisions between theory and practice, and articulates a need and responsibility for parents to grapple with alternative understandings of disability and alternative (collective) ways to create better social conditions for their children.     

Children's Challenges to Efforts to Save Them: Competing Knowledges in the Child Welfare System

The child welfare system is founded on a belief that children are sometimes endangered by their parents or caregivers and must be saved by agents of the state. Children are perceived as objects to be saved, but they are rarely seen as active strategists in their interactions with child welfare system social workers. Using ethnographic data collected during observations of social workers and juvenile court proceedings, this article shows how children have their own complex understandings of state intervention and strive—to varying degrees of success—to contest official views of their lives and provide competing forms of knowledge. Specifically, children attempt to rework state actors' perceptions of their families and familial problems, use state actors as an audience for their versions of their lives, and attempt to mobilize state power for personal or material gain.     

The extent of family and school social capital promoting positive subjective well-being among primary school children in Shenzhen, China

This study aimed to examine, first, the extent to which variations in family and school social capital can be explained by child's differing socioeconomic and demographic background and school characteristics; and second, the extent to which family and school social capital in combination might be associated with variations in child subjective well-being in Shenzhen, China. This study was a cross-sectional survey design, using stratified random sampling. A total of 1306 sixth-grade primary school children and their parents were drawn from 16 schools, and a self-administered questionnaire was used. The results suggested that gender difference, the only child status at home and hukou status had impacts on family and school social capital accrued among primary school children in Shenzhen. There were also links between child's perception of connectedness to their parents, peers, and teachers, and their positive child subjective well-being.     

A survey of disabled children and young people’s views about their quality of life

This study aimed to explore disabled children and young people’s perspectives about their quality of life, in terms of physical, mental and social well-being. Ninety-one disabled children, recruited through voluntary organisations in Scotland, completed KIDSCREEN-27, a validated measure of health-related quality of life for children. Findings were compared with those from a European study of predominantly non-disabled children. The children gave largely positive reports about school, family relationships and their physical health. However, one in three reported often feeling ‘sad’ and many were excluded from social activities with their peers. Expectations of achieving academic qualifications, and moving into further or higher education, were generally low. The children’s perceived quality of life was lower than their European counterparts, less so in relation to school but particularly for friendships and peer support. The findings are discussed in the light of the social relational understanding of disability. Policy and practice implications are identified.     

Exploring the moral experiences of Anishinaabeg children in Rapid Lake,Quebec

This study was developed to guard against the imposition of settler-based colonial ethnocentric conceptions of moral development by exploring the everyday moral experiences of children in an Anishinaabeg community. A focused ethnography of 33 children over 3.5 months was conducted, which included participant observation, group activities and individual and group interviews. Drawing on their unique cultural and social background, children showed they had rich moral understandings and acted as moral agents in matters that affected them. These results help advance our understanding of what is morally significant to Anishinaabeg children in their daily experiences, in line with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's Calls to Action.     

Students’ health engagement and affective relations in Danish upper secondary school

To increase our understanding of the dynamics of young people’s embodied engagement in health, this article analyses Danish upper secondary school students’ understandings and practices of health and the role of the school environment in these dynamics. Participatory, visual and narrative data were collected during fieldwork with 37 students aged 16–17. Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy of the body is applied to analyse the affective relations and emerging body-health assemblages within the students’ school life, which generated force and vitality (here conceptualised as health). Through becoming within sensuous, social and political body-health assemblages, the students attempted to curb school stress, sustain social belonging in an individualistic school environment and both reproduce affirming power discourses and subvert their territorialisation. The study proposes an analytical shift in perspective on young people’s health away from an individualistic ‘components approach’ towards a relational understanding, and suggests that students’ health at school relates to collectivity, quality, rhythm and co-produced engagement, rather than individuality, quantity, rules and performance, which increasingly characterise Danish health discourse and school policy.     

Children's experiences of disability: pointers to a social model of childhood disability

The social model of disability has paid little attention to disabled children, with few attempts to explore how far it provides an adequate explanatory framework for their experiences. This paper reports findings from a two-year study exploring the lived experiences of 26 disabled children aged 7-15. They experienced disability in four ways—in terms of impairment, difference, other people's behaviour towards them, and material barriers. Most young people presented themselves as similar to non-disabled children: it is suggested they may have lacked a positive language with which to discuss difference. It is further argued that Thomas's (1999) social relational model of disability can help inform understandings of children's experiences, with 'barriers to being' having particular significance.     

Schools and Refugee Children: The Case of Syrians in Turkey

Education is the most effective tool for migrant and refugee integration. When successfully provided, it is particularly useful for eradicating the traces of trauma among refugee children, offering means to social mobility and enhancing social and structural integration into society. This article introduces schooling options for Syrian children in Turkey and deals with how school types shape experiences of these students through the accounts of their parents with attention to the notion of institutional habitus. Drawing on a comparative qualitative case study of refugee children in Temporary Education Centres and Public Schools in Turkey, it specifically investigates how schools with their practices, organization, and regulations contribute to or hinder the integration and adaptation of Syrian refugee children to school and society in Turkey.     

Social disparities in children's vocabulary in early childhood. Does pre‐school education help to close the gap?1

Children start school with differing levels of skills. Thus, children of different social origin have different probabilities of educational success right from the start of their school career. This paper analyses how the gap in language abilities of children with different social backgrounds develops from age three to five. A focus lies on the question whether pre-school education can help to close this gap. The data of the UK Millennium Cohort Study (MCS) show that children's score on a standardized vocabulary test strongly depends on their parents' education. These social differences remain stable or even increase slightly over the two-year period. Using fixed effect models, it is demonstrated that children of higher educated parents can improve their vocabulary more strongly than children whose parents have a lower educational level. Participation in an early education institution positively affects the vocabulary development of children with lower educated parents while there is no significant pre-school effect for children of higher educated parents. The results indicate that pre-school attendance does not lead to a catching-up process of children with lower educated parents. But without pre-school attendance, the gap between children of higher and lower educated parents widens even further.     

“Giant Leap 1”: A Social and Emotional Learning program's effects on the transition to first grade

This study analyzed how student characteristics influenced the effects of a Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) program implemented in the first grade. A total of 14 teachers and 228 children participated in the study: 144 children participated in the SEL intervention program (including 65 pre-school children, group II), and 84 children composed the control group. The pre- and post-test assessments involved hetero- (teacher) and self-reporting (child) scales. The SEL intervention produced significant gains in the children's relationships with their peers, academic behavior, social skills, emotional knowledge, school learning skills, and school, behavioral, and social adjustment, independent of their previous skill level or gender. The SEL intervention was effective at improving the interpersonal strength of children with previously low skill levels, the intrapersonal and total strength of children of parents with a secondary level of education (groups I and II), and preventing the disruption of school functioning in children with parents with a higher education level (group II).     

ADOPTION:

In this article, we focus on how understandings of the past influence the process of integrating older special needs children into family life. We present the stories of two families who adopted older special needs children as they reconstructed the past, experinced the present, and projected the future. We draw upon social, pragmatic, and postmodern theories of the past to guide our interpretations and understandings of these families' adoption experiences. The dominant ideology of family influenced their story construction, and it was against this conception that their stories were evaluated. We followed the Litners and the Becks as they used the past to create stories that enabled and disabled their family life in the present and in the future. From the Litners' and the Becks' stories, we learned that when families are too limited by a cultural conception of an ideal adoptive family, their ability to use the past to create stories to help them live in the present and to project a shared future becomes restricted.
Our adoption failed because we understimated the past and overstimated our ability to create stories with happy endings. (Mrs. Beck)     

Why more ‘quality time’ is not on the top of children's lists: the ‘qualities of time’ for children1

For many years the everyday reality of working parents and their children has been captured in notions of ‘quality time’ versus ‘quantity time’. On the one hand it is suggested that what families need is ‘more time’ for parents to spend together with their children and less time working. On the other hand this has been countered with arguments saying that attention has to be paid to how parents spend their time together with their children. As a result quality time is often presented through idealised images of ‘happy families’. Quality time is seen as parents engaging with their children in particular activities or outdoor excursions that create and maintain family enjoyment, care and togetherness. However, such debates are based on assumptions of what would be ‘good’ for today's children and neglect the perspective of children themselves. This paper draws on field research carried out with 10–11‐year‐old children on their understandings and use of time in an urban and a rural setting in the north of England. The paper points to five ‘qualities of time’ identified by children. These qualities suggest that children's views of time spent with their families cannot be seen as separate from the time they spend with friends, at school and on their own. The paper argues that the quality/quantity time conundrum needs replacing by fuller and more representative accounts of the varied aspects of time that matter for children. These need to be situated in the processes through which family, school and work life take place on a daily basis and in relation to children's life course. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

No Degree,No Job: Adolescent Mothers’ Perceptions of the Impact that Adolescent Fathers’ Human Capital has on Paternal Financial and Social Capital

Becoming an adolescent father truncates young males’ opportunities to complete high school and secure employment, which can hinder their capacity to contribute financial and social capital to their children. Based on 69 adolescent mother reports, results suggest that whereas employment status is associated with adolescent fathers’ physical and financial presence, high school completion is strongly associated with the nature and quality of parenting and co-parenting behaviors. Implications for school counselors, teachers, social workers, and future research are discussed.