Liz Jones

Animating classroom ethnography: overcoming video‐fear

This article addresses the use of video in classroom research. Influenced by the work of Deleuze on cinema, it challenges the mundane realism that continues to regulate video method, and its role in perpetuating what Deleuze calls the ‘everyday banality’ that produces and conceals the ‘intolerable’. In failing to interfere with the everyday banality of the normal child, research colludes with the production of exclusion, disadvantage and a stunted set of possible futures for children. Written by four ethnographers of early childhood who have themselves (mis)used video cameras in classrooms, the article describes an experimental video film that attempts to intervene in the repetitious production of the banal. The film takes the form of an assemblage that deploys montage, cutting, disconnections of sound, vision and script, and the jolt of the irrational cut. In particular, it tries to mobilise the barely formed, dimly glimpsed sensations that comprise ‘affect’ in its Deleuzian sense.

Becoming a problem: behaviour and reputation in the early years classroom

How does it happen that some children acquire a reputation as a ‘problem’ in school? The article discusses some findings of a qualitative study involving children in the Reception year (ages 4–5). The research focused on problematic behaviour as this emerged within, and was shaped by, the culture of the classroom. A key question for the research was: what makes it difficult for some children to be, and to be recognised as, good students? Using an analytic framework derived from discourse and conversation analysis, we identify some critical factors in the production of reputation, including: the ‘discursive framing’ of behaviour; the public nature of classroom discipline; the linking of behaviour, learning and emotions; the interactional complexities of being (seen to be) good, and the demands on children of passing as the ‘proper child’ required by prevailing discourses of normal development, as coded in UK early years curriculum policy and pedagogy.

Silence as Resistance to Analysis: Or, on Not Opening One’s Mouth Properly

The article engages with the problematic nature of silence and its tendency to trouble qualitative inquiry. Silence is frequently read as resistance—as an impediment to analysis or the emergence of an authentic voice. Rather than seeking methodological remedies for such impediments, the article dwells on, and in, the recalcitrance of silence. The authors read silence, via Derrida and Freud, as the trace of something Other at the heart of utterance—something intractable, unspeakable, unreasonable, unanalyzable. Silence confounds interpretation and manifests, intolerably, the illusory status of speech as full “presence” or living voice. Yet it also incites the search for meaning and is therefore productive. How might Method work with the alterity of silence, rather than seeking to cure or compensate for its necessary insufficiencies? The article is organized around three examples or parables of silence. Humor gets tangled up in the text further on.

Documenting classroom life: how can I write about what I am seeing?

The article is located within a UK based ethnographic research project where the central aim is to understand the processes by which 4— 5 year-old children begin to develop an identity as ‘naughty’ within school. This article considers certain practices that are embedded within the act of documenting data and how these relate to and are connected with identity. Having foregrounded what could be regarded as tactics for ‘authenticating’ data we then move to offer alternative sets of practices where data is considered more in terms of a ‘montage’ where ‘several different images are superimposed onto one another’ (Denzin and Lincoln, 2003: 6).

Why do Muslim parents want Muslim schools

Islam is a way of life, we try to do what the Prophet did. (Muslim teacher) The small‐scale study focuses on a number of Muslim parents and practitioners who have rejected local primary community schools in favour of Muslim faith schooling. The rejection of the type of schools that we support and that we train our student teachers to prepare for prompts considerable concern. This concern has led us to question in what ways Muslim schools represent a challenge to our own educational beliefs and values. This study is an attempt to identify the source of that challenge and what it means to our understanding of ourselves as white educators and researchers and the work we do with trainee teachers. It leads us to question our perspective on a range of issues including diversity, inclusion, parental rights and ultimately the aims of education.

Children and objects: affection and infection

This paper considers young children’s (aged 3–5 years) relations with objects, and in particular objects that are brought from home to school. We begin by considering the place of objects within early years classrooms and their relationship to children’s education before considering why some objects are often separated from their owners on entry to the classroom. We suggest that the ‘arrest’ of objects is as a consequence of them being understood as ‘infecting’ specific perceptions or constructs of young children. We further suggest that a focus on the dichotomy between affection/infection for and of certain objects may offer new possibilities for seeing and engaging with children, thus expanding the narrow imaginaries of children that are coded in developmental psychology, UK early years education policy and classroom practice.

The Possibilities and Constraints of Multimedia as a Basis for Critical Reflection.

The use of video evidence as a vehicle for promoting discussion and critical reflection is well established in educational literature in the field of professional development and is gradually becoming more accepted as a research method. There is general agreement also that in relation to image‐based research the combination of video evidence of practice and professional dialogue promote critical reflection and can be instrumental in bringing about changes to that practice. Our aim in this paper is firstly to explore briefly our use of video images as a catalyst for promoting rich dialogue that supports multiple perspectives, meanings and interpretations of classroom events. We describe from a very practical perspective the trials and tribulations of developing a methodology for collecting and analyzing video recordings of classroom practice. Secondly, we describe our attempts to capture and narrate the experience as a multimodal account (Kress & Leeuwen, 2001) for dissemination purposes. The experience of coming to understand and work with the possibilities and constraints offered by the integration of media such as graphic/video image, text, music and becoming familiar with the language of ‘roll‐overs’, ‘one‐stop‐shops’, ‘rendering’ was for us a very steep learning curve which proved both exciting and challenging.

Children's Encounters with Things: Schooling the Body.

This article draws on work around matter and the material in order to examine how (extra)ordinary “things” are used to (re)produce formulaic and predictable performances within the context of an early years classroom. Using ethnographic data I focus on a series of encounters where oscillations between (in)animate objects and the child work at schooling the body. I also note how the “work” of things constitutes a point of tension where on the one hand they are implicated in discourses of normalization yet simultaneously work at “othering.” The article also argues that despite their coercive propensities children’s relationships with and through material things can open up possibilities for dislocating sedimented pedagogical practices where “something else” becomes possible.

An Enquiry into Transitions From Being a ‘Learner of Mathematics’ to Becoming a ‘Teacher of Mathematics’

D are abhorrent creatures. They instil fear and are best avoided. Yet mathematics as a demon has managed to ‘lick’ this student. Does this imply that the demon has been tamed and that some kind of affection lies between the student and the subject? Has the student’s own fear of the subject been licked? If it has, how were the transitions between fear and friendliness, abhorrence and affection, made? Many transitions are potentially problematic. But for students entering initial training as primary teachers, who so often perceive mathematics as a source of anxiety, the movement between the two locations of learner and teacher seems especially fraught. This exploratory article marks an attempt at having some appreciation of the various kinds of ‘self work’ (Stronach and Maclure, 1997, p. 135) that is undertaken by students when making the move from being a ‘learner of mathematics’ to becoming a ‘teacher of mathematics’. We suggest that for such students ‘identity’ can be seen as a key feature in easing those tensions which lie between the two sites. Subsequently we try to show how particular constructions of the ‘self’ are used to surmount and negotiate hurdles and boundaries. This includes perceived lack of mathematical competence. Our main interest, then, is perceptions of the ‘self’ and how, in relation to mathematics, it is talked about, described and generally theorised. In part, this involves looking at the kinds of emotional baggage that centre on mathematics and which students have collected over a period of time. We are particularly interested in those ways ‘identity’ seems to assist in both accruing and jettisoning such baggage. We also note and discuss how accounts of past mathematical experiences are filtered through current perceptual frameworks. It is this crisscrossing between present perceptions of mathematics and the self, memories of mathematics and the self, and how together these feed into and help fashion future constructions of the self as ‘teacher of mathematics’, that we attempt to address. A n euiry to trasitions

Reimagining quality in early childhood

This special issue brings together a collection of rich, complex and challenging contributions that attempt to offer generative approaches to reconfigure what might constitute ‘quality’ within early years education. The issue came about from a shared concern about what Moss (this issue) refers to as the ‘gravitational pull’ of quality in early childhood education; debates about quality have existed for a considerable time and, despite rigorous critique, remain resolute. This issue aims to revisit and extend the groundbreaking work undertaken by Gunilla Dahlberg, Peter Moss and Alan Pence (1999, 2007) in Beyond Quality in Early Childhood Education and Care: Postmodern Perspectives and in the subsequent revised edition. In both texts, the authors made the astute observation that the concept and language of quality cannot accommodate issues such as diversity and multiple perspectives, contextual specificity and subjectivity. They argue that we must ‘go beyond the concept of quality’ (Dahlberg et al., 2007: 6) and, in so doing, suggest working with a new concept: ‘meaning making’. As noted by the authors: