Developing children: developmental discourses underpinning physical education at three Scottish preschool settings

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Journal Title on publication date, available online: doi: 10.1080/13573322.2015.1114917This paper reports on one aspect of a study that investigated the place and meaning of ‘physical education’ to practitioners and children at three preschool settings in Scotland. We employed a poststructural type of discourse analysis to examine the developmental discourses the 14 participating practitioners drew on when talking about ‘physical education’ at preschools, during semi-structured interviews. Three main discourses around the notion of developmentalism were identified during analysis of the adults’ interview data: (1) preschool children learn and develop through play; (2) preschool children should have choices and freedom; and (3) sometimes more structured activities are needed. The practitioners were heavily invested in developmental ‘truths’ about how preschool children learn and develop. They were in agreement that play is a vital element of preschool education, and that, consequently, children should be provided with opportunities for exploration and making choices. However, they also talked about sometimes ‘needing’ to restrict children’s freedom and provide more adult-led activities. Our findings illustrate the strength of developmental discourses at the three settings. We suggest that preschool practitioners, as well as policy-makers and researchers, should critically reflect on the effects of taken-for-granted developmental discourses, and move beyond thinking in terms of binaries such as ‘physical education versus play’ or ‘structure versus freedom’

Understanding the Processes Behind Student Designing: Cases from Singapore

A common perception of designing is that it represents a highly complex activity that is manageable by only a few. However it has also been argued that all individuals are innately capable of designing. Taking up this latter view, we explored the processes behind student designing in the context of Design and Technology (D&T), a subject taught at the Secondary school level in Singapore. We examined the design journey undertaken by two students to understand what designing is like at their level. Case study methodology was adopted to develop a rich data set emerging from the students’ design journals, maps of the students’ design process, and interviews with the students and supervising teachers. The findings revealed that these students had innate capacities to design. Although the approach taken by each student differed, as reflected in visual representations reflecting the design process as well as their commentary, each displayed similar forms of design thinking. That is, both students proposed a novel and innovative solution to their design problem and were able to articulate sound reasoning of their design decisions throughout the entire design process. The supervising teachers enacted a more facilitative pedagogy that supported each student’s design process; this approach differs from traditional pedagogical practices in Singaporean D&T that can be characterised as model-focused and ‘top down’ in nature