The Emergence of Friendships and Social Groups in Kindergarten

The school classroom is an inherently social setting where students interact with each other for seven hours, five days a week. The purpose of this study was to gain a deeper understanding of how students select their friends and how social groups begin to form and emerge. The author collected data through student and teacher interviews, dictated drawings, a sociogram, and a parent survey. After analyzing the data by using the constant comparative method, the author found four major themes. The first was that each social clique came equipped with unique characteristics that the clique members embodied. Second, there were countless social learning opportunities embedded within every interaction. Third, the decision-making process was very dynamic and constantly changing. Fourth, young children value very similar things in friendships. This study may provide useful information to other educators who are trying to figure out the different social dynamics present in their classrooms

Undergraduate Research as Pedagogy: Resisting Reproduction by Studying Novice Teachers

In this study, we (a university professor and four undergraduate researchers) conducted an autoethnography to explore the perceptions of the four undergraduate researchers as we studied the decision-making of novice teachers regarding literacy assessment and instruction. Drawing on Bourdieu’s concepts of field, capital, and habitus, the undergraduate researchers learned about the cycle of pedagogical reproduction that often occurs in the first years of teaching. This knowledge provided them with the capital to develop strategies for finding a good-fit teaching position as they entered the teaching profession and to acquire a problem-solving mindset to strategically implement the literacy practices they learned about in their teacher education programs

Models of Resistance: Novice Teachers Negotiating Barriers to Best Practice

The purpose of this study was to examine how graduates from three teacher education programs made decisions regarding literacy instruction and assessment as well as the extent to which they were able to implement practices learned in their education programs. Participants were interviewed and observed multiple times, and a variety of documents, such as lesson plans, assessments, and journal prompts, were collected. Data were analyzed using the constant comparative method and Bourdieu’s concepts of field, capital, and habitus. Although the participants initially accepted the existing practices of their schools, they later implemented concepts learned in their education programs. The ways in which they resisted the barriers they faced included resistance with conflict, resistance with an attitude, resistance with relationship, and resistance by making a change