Young children enacting governance: Child's play?
Cobb, Charlotte L., Danby, Susan J., & Farrell, Ann M. (2005) Young children enacting governance: Child's play? In Australian Association for Research in Education, 28 November -1 December 2005, Parramatta, N.S.W..
Schools, homes and communities are increasingly perceived as risky spaces for children. This concern is a driving force behind many forms of governance imposed upon Australian children by well-meaning adults. Children are more and more the subjects of both overt and covert regulation by teachers and other adults in school contexts. Are children, though, passive in this process of governance? It is this issue that is the focus of this paper. In order to respond to the question of how young children enact governance in their everyday lives, video-recorded episodes of naturally occurring interactions among children in a preparatory classroom were captured. These data were then transcribed and analysed using the methods of conversation analysis and membership categorisation analysis. This paper shows a number of strategies that the children used when enacting governance within their peer cultures in the classroom. It focuses specifically on how adult and childformulated rules and social orders of the classroom were drawn upon and developed in order to control and govern during the interaction. This paper illustrates that children are not passive in enacting governance, but actively and competently enact governance through their peer cultures. These findings are significant for educators to consider, as they help to develop an understanding of the complex social orders that children are continually constructing in the early childhood classroom.
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|Item Type:||Conference Paper|
|Subjects:||Australian and New Zealand Standard Research Classification > EDUCATION (130000) > OTHER EDUCATION (139900) > Education not elsewhere classified (139999)|
|Divisions:||Current > QUT Faculties and Divisions > Faculty of Education|
|Copyright Owner:||Copyright 2005 AARE and (The authors)|
|Copyright Statement:||Reproduced in accordance with the copyright policy of the publisher.|
|Deposited On:||09 Mar 2007|
|Last Modified:||29 Feb 2012 13:23|
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