Children And Their Primary Schools

First published in 1987. Several of the chapters in this book were presented at a symposium held at the British Educational Research Association Conference in Bristol in September 1986. This volume's title is a deliberate echo of the title of the Plowden Report (CACE, 1967). It is now twenty years since Plowden was published and the chapters in this collection constitute an attempt to present a new perspective on one of the central assumptions which underpinned the Report - on the 'nature of 'children'. Within the book there are two themes of particular importance. The first is focussed on how children themselves are perceived, bearing in mind new developments in child psychology and in sociological studies of children's perspectives and behaviour in schools. The second concerns the implications which such developments may have for teaching and learning processes in classrooms.

Andrew Pollard University of the West of England at Bristol.

Introduction: New Perspectives on Children 1 Childcare Ideologies and Resistance: The Manipulative Strategies of Pre-school Children2 The Intellectual Search of Young Children 3 The Accomplishment of Genderedness in Pre-school Children 4 The Time of Their Lives: Bureaucracy and the Nursery School 5 Making Sense of School 6 Letting Them Get On With It: A Study of Unsupervised Group Talk in an Infant School 7 Becoming a Junior: Pupil Development Following Transfer From Infants 8 Child in Control: Towards an Interpretive Model of Teaching and Learning 9 Classroom Task Organization and Children's Friendships 10 The Culture of the Primary School Playground 11 Goodies, Jokers and Gangs 12 Child Culture at School: A Clash Between Gendered Worlds? 13 Stories Children Tell 14 Towards an Anti-racist Initiative in the All White Primary School: A Case Study 15 Anxieties and Anticipations-Pupils' Views of Transfer 236 to Secondary School