Learning is a fundamental concern within Western

societies as demonstrated through the development

of schooling systems and National Curriculums,

both of which strive to take charge of and advance

children’s learning

Hardman, M.

Stivaros, H.

Tobbell, Jane

English

University of Huddersfield Repository

University of Huddersfield RepositoryStivaros, H., Tobbell, Jane and Hardman, M.‘If you don’t understand this don’t worry, for the rest of you I will go on’: Deconstructing children’s opportunity to participate in the classroom community of practiceOriginal CitationStivaros, H., Tobbell, Jane and Hardman, M. (2005) ‘If you don’t understand this don’t worry, for the rest of you I will go on’: Deconstructing children’s opportunity to participate in the classroom community of practice. In: Developmental Psychology Section Annual Conference., 2-5 September 2004, Leeds Metropolitan University.This version is available at http://eprints.hud.ac.uk/636/The University Repository is a digital collection of the research output of theUniversity, available on Open Access. Copyright and Moral Rights for the itemson this site are retained by the individual author and/or other copyright owners.Users may access full items free of charge; copies of full text items generallycan be reproduced, displayed or performed and given to third parties in anyformat or medium for personal research or study, educational or not-for-profitpurposes without prior permission or charge, provided:• The authors, title and full bibliographic details is credited in any copy;• A hyperlink and/or URL is included for the original metadata page; and• The content is not changed in any way.For more information, including our policy and submission procedure, pleasecontact the Repository Team at: E.mailbox@hud.ac.uk.http://eprints.hud.ac.uk/Drawing to differentiate: The effects ofcolourF. SPENSLEY, S. McGINLEY & C. MORGENSTERN, Oxford University.Sitton and Light’s (1992) drawing differentiationtasks (draw a man, woman, boy & girl) waspresented to 60 four- to six-year-old children, tocomplete either with a black pen or with 10coloured pens (repeated measures). Differentiationby height was found in the black pen condition,comparable to Sitton and Light’s findings, but notin the coloured-pen condition where the additionalcognitive load also lead to a decrement in thenumber of features produced. In contrast, a copying task using dolls (betweensubjects, 60 four- to six-year-old children) foundthat coloured pens facilitated copyingperformance. Children produced greaterdifferentiation by salient features (e.g. skirts), anddifferentiated by height with coloured pens, butnot in the black pen condition. In this case thecolours seemed to relieve the problem oftranslation into monochrome, by providing a directrepresentational translation that was simpler thanshape.fiona.spensley@psy.ox.ac.uk ‘If you don’t understand this don’tworry, for the rest of you I will go on’:Deconstructing children’s opportunityto participate in the classroomcommunity of practiceH. STIVAROS, J. TOBBELL & M. HARDMAN,Leeds Metropolitan University.Learning is a fundamental concern within Westernsocieties as demonstrated through the developmentof schooling systems and National Curriculums,both of which strive to take charge of and advancechildren’s learning. Current Government ideologiesand classroom practices implicitly assumeassociationist learning processes and unproblematicindividual competence despite acknowledgementby much psychological theory, of the constructiveand interactive nature of children’s learning.According to the Community of Practiceformulation, learning is characterised asparticipation in the practices of the environment.Drawing on the ethnographic research of one ofthe authors, which explores the quotidian learningexperiences of year six children, this paperilluminates the role of teacher as gatekeeper topupils’ learning. It is argued that teachers’classroom practices serve to dictate pupils’opportunities to participate in learning. This is apowerful supposition and in terms of children’seducational development, suggests teachers andschools need to ensure access to participationlevels of all pupils.helenstiv@yahoo.com Singing with infants: Balancing controlwith collaborationA. STREET, University of Roehampton.This paper presents the second of a two-part studyexploring mothers’ attitudes towards singing totheir infants in daily caring routines. The first partwas a survey of 104 mothers’ attitudes to singing.The second part analysed observations of video-recordings of mothers interacting with infantsbetween four and 10 months old. Recordings weremade in naturalistic settings (at home or in anequivalent convenient venue) of 16 mother-infantpairs, followed by immediate playback and recall,to obtain mothers’ commentaries on their infants’responses and their own feelings. Thesecommentaries were recorded and transcribed.Analysis classified six types of singing in the videovignettes. Detailed sequential analysis of onevignette showed elements of collaboration acrossdifferent singing types. The two recording processescomplement each other and reveal insights intothese intimate musical exchanges. The resultssuggest that mothers’ singing is a very variedactivity, dependent on their infants’ states and ontheir own needs to communicate.streetalison@aol.com Reconceptualising learning: Legitimateparticipation in communities ofpractice, explaining transition fromprimary to secondary schoolJ. TOBBELLl, Leeds Metropolitan University.The structural and pedagogical differences betweenprimary and secondary school have been listed in anumber of research papers and have beenidentified as one of the reasons for the difficultprocess of transition. However, to date thesedifferences have been merely described (e.g.original ORACLE project and the follow up 20 yearson) and subsequent assumptions made about whythey present difficulties. In this paper I will discussa six-month research project which followed 55children from primary school to secondary school.The outcomes demonstrated that primary andsecondary schools constitute two cultures sodifferent that notions of smooth transitions arerendered an impossible dream. I will use thelearning as participation literature to demonstratehow the learning and performance are embeddedin the wider practices of the schools so that, inorder to succeed, children need to reevaluate andforget primary practices and involve themselves ina set of new procedures, which a significantproportion of them will find problematic becauseof the shift in emotional and motivational factorspursuant to the transition. I will use the data tochallenge traditional notions of learning and tosuggest how inclusionary practices can addresstransition problems.J.E.Tobbell@leedsmet.ac.uk A connectionist approach to teachingrhythm notation to three- to four-year-old pre-school childrenY. TOMMIS & D.M.A. FAZEY, University ofBangor.In many countries, including Britain and the USA,rhythm notation is traditionally taught utilising themathematical relationship between note values (for example, one semibreve equals four crotchets).The purpose of this study was to investigatewhether it was possible for very young children tolearn to perform from conventional rhythmnotation without being taught such rules. Here thechildren were simply exposed to rhythmic phrasesalong with their correct performance. Subsequentlythey were able to accurately perform previouslyunseen phrases comprised of the learned notevalues (semibreves, minims, crotchets and quavers).The children (n=10) received a pre-test, 20 10-minute teaching sessions, followed by post-test. Pre- to post-test gains were significant(p<0.001). Scores on a re-test administered sevenweeks later were not significantly different frompost-test scores (p>0.05).yvonne@bangor.ac.uk Agency: Measuring selfhood intoddlers’ social actionsL. VITTORINI & A. CHADDOCK, University ofDurham.This paper will present a new measure of selfhoodin two-year-olds – interpersonal agency – thatquantifies the ability to act effectively upon theself’s goals in social interaction. Using social playand interpersonal conflict as arenas of analysis,individual differences in interpersonal agencyamong toddlers are described and exemplified. Itwill be shown that children as young as two yearsof age vary quite widely in their ability orwillingness to affect the social environment, thatthis variation is consistent across a range ofinteractive partners, and that it is predicted bysecurity of attachment such that securely attachedchildren are more agentic than their insecure peers.Interactionist theories of self-development placethe explanation for differences in selfhood in thechild’s history of social interaction. Hence, in anexploration of potential determinants, aspects ofmaternal interaction that may promoteinterpersonal agency in toddlers will behighlighted, using videotaped examples.Vittorini@durham.ac.ukAcademic achievement and socialfunctioning of children with andwithout learning difficultiesA. WALKER, University of Leeds & D. NABUZOKA, Sheffield Hallam University.Academic achievement and social functioning ofchildren with learning difficulties (LD), low achieving(LA)-, and high achieving (HA) children wasexamined. The children were seven- to 12-years-old(n=234, including 39 children with LD). Childrenwithout LD were assigned to the LA or HA categoryon the basis of attainment scores on exams forMathematics and English. Sociometric andbehavioural scores were also collected for each child.Findings indicated positive correlations betweenacademic attainment and positive social behaviours;and negative correlations between academicattainment and negative social behaviours.Behavioural attributes accounted for greatervariance in social preference than in academicachievement. HA children scored higher on socialpreference and positive behaviours than LA and LDchildren. Only help-seeking behaviour discriminatedbetween LD and LA groups – children with LDscoring significantly higher. These findings indicate arelationship between social adjustment andacademic achievement and that interventionstrategies need to target social relationshipdifficulties in LA children as well as children with LD.A.W.Walker@leeds.ac.uk ‘He takes after his father’: Children’sreasoning about parent–offspring andsibling resemblanceJ.M. WILLIAMS & L.A. SMITH, University ofEdinburgh.This study is part of a three-year longitudinalproject funded by the Wellcome Trust examiningthe development of children’s intuitive inheritanceconcepts. It reports cross-sectional comparisons ona ‘mother-bias’ task. Children from four agecohorts (four, seven, 10 and 14 years; n=180) wereinterviewed individually using a forced-choiceprocedure about their beliefs concerning theinheritance of three different feature types(physical characteristics, personality traits anddisabilities). They were presented with pictures ofthe biological mother and father exhibitingvariations in the feature at issue. Children wereasked to select the most likely offspring out of fouralternatives: same feature as the mother, samefeature as the father, combined features of motherand father, neither parental feature. Children thenmade judgements about a second offspring. Forboth judgements the child was required to providean explanation of inheritance. The results showedsignificant age and feature differences in children’sbeliefs regarding the inheritance of characteristics.Although younger children have a generalunderstanding of parent-offspring resemblance,overall the results indicate that older childrendevelop more complex conceptions of inheritancewhich include a recognition of multiple sources ofinheritance, awareness of genes and geneticuncertainty. Joanne.Williams@education.ed.ac.uk Emotion recognition by children withDown’s syndrome: Effects of varyingemotion label and expression intensityK.R. WILLIAMS, D.S. WILLIS, J.G. WISHART &T.K. PITCAIRN, University of Edinburgh.Sociocognitive ability is often thought to be arelative strength amongst those with Down’ssyndrome (DS). However, recent work suggests thatsome children with DS may experience difficultieswith certain aspects of social cognition, includingrecognition of specific facial expressions ofemotion. The study to be reported used a photomatching task to further explore emotionrecognition ability amongst children with DS(n=28), and compared DS performance with that ofchildren with non-specific intellectual disabilities(n=25) and typically developing children (n=28)matched on cognitive and language ability. Fourconditions (regular vs exaggerated emotions,emotion labelling vs generic task instructions) wereused in an attempt to establish the extent to whichemotion recognition task difficulties in DS relate toperceptual aspects of facial expression or toThe British Psychological Society – 2005 Proceedings 41

‘If you don’t understand this don’t

worry, for the rest of you I will go on’:

Deconstructing children’s opportunity

to participate in the classroom

community of practice

‘If you don’t understand this don’t worry, for the rest of you I will go on’: Deconstructing children’s opportunity to participate in the classroom community of practice

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