How do children understand themselves as learners? Towards a learner-centred understanding of pedagogy

This paper challenges notions that pedagogy is predominantly rational, conscious and deliberate. Drawing on two research projects about experiences of learning in primary and secondary schools, the paper explores pedagogic relationships and the ways these structure and enable different kinds of learning and knowledge creation. The data are read with (Felman, 1987) the psychoanalytic writings of Wilfred Bion to investigate the ways in which knowing and learning are bound up in the unconscious emotional flows of classroom relationships. A learner -centred understanding of pedagogy is tentatively and critically developed. The desirability and some simultaneous difficulties of working with such notions of pedagogy are discussed

'I would rather die': reasons given by 16-year-olds for not continuing their study of mathematics

Improving participation rates in specialist mathematics after the subject ceases to be compulsory at age 16 is part of government policy in England. This article provides independent and recent support for earlier findings concerning reasons for non- participation, based on free response and closed items in a questionnaire with a sample of over 1500 students in 17 schools, close to the moment of choice. The analysis supports findings that perceived difficulty and lack of confidence are important reasons for students not continuing with mathematics, and that perceived dislike and boredom, and lack of relevance, are also factors. There is a close relationship between reasons for non-participation and predicted grade, and a weaker relation to gender. An analysis of the effects of schools, demonstrates that enjoyment is the main factor differentiating schools with high and low participation indices. Building on discussion of these findings, ways of improving participation are briefly suggested

Thinking and learning? On (not) sleeping in the classroom

Working with ideas from Bion and Ogden and two short data extracts, this paper explores the productivity of the notions of dreaming and talking-as-dreaming for thinking about difficult moments in pedagogic encounters. Education (and neo-liberalism more generally) valorises what Bion calls the Waking-state; this paper explores the ways in which this preference may incur costs to learning, and why maintaining a connection to dreaming in the classroom may be more productiv

Primary school mathematics: an inside view

In 1952 Lucien Le Cam announced his celebrated result that, for regular univariate statistical models, sets of points of superefficiency have Lebesgue measure zero. After reviewing the turbulent history of early studies of superefficiency, I suggest using the notion of computability as a tool for exploring the phenomenon of superefficiency. It turns out that only computable parameter points can be points of superefficiency for computable estimators. This algorithmic version of Le Cam's result implies, in particular, that sets of points of superefficiency not only have Lebesgue measure zero but are even countable