Schooling the Child

<p>What is a child?<br>How is the concept of childhood defined?<br>This book aims to explore these perennial and complex questions by looking at the way in which society constructs and understands childhood. The authors focus in particular on the school, a key location within which social and cultural notions of childhood are defined and performed.<br>The book is divided into three major parts:<br><strong>Part 1</strong> frames the accepted notions of childhood and schooling, and introduces ethnomethodological analysis as a tool to rethink current versions of the child.<br><strong>Part 2</strong> focuses on how school students become members of a category within the institution of the classroom. The authors explore this idea through transcripts of talk between teachers and students, and amongst students themselves in two classroom studies.<br><strong>Part 3</strong> looks at the materials of education, concentrating specifically on children's texts. The authors examine how such texts portray a notion of the child within the story, and also assume a notion of the child as reader of the story.<br>This important book shows how much is at stake for children in accepting adults' deep-seated notions of childhood. It will be of great interest to educational researchers and policy makers, sociologists of childhood, teachers and student teachers.</p> Section I 1. Framing Childhood 2. Rethinking Children and Childhood 3. Rethinking Schooling and Classrooms 4. Reconsidering Social Action and Social Structure Section II: Respecifying the Institutional Child 5. The School Child 6. The Classroom Child: Variations on a Theme 7. The Child of the Group Section III: The Materials of Education 8. The Materials of Education 9. Teaching the Category into Being 10. The Students' Writing Section IV 11. The Public Specification of the Child