This book explores how poststructural theory can make an important contribution to the growing body of work on playwork as an academic field of practice and research. Drawing on theoretical concepts used by sociologists and philosophers, such as the sociological imagination (Mills); hauntings and the fictive (Derrida) and technologies of power and the self (Foucault), the text considers how these devices may be methodologically productive for playwork research. It reframes research into children and childhood as a process in which research and practice are connected but diverse skills. The book raises questions around power and voice, and highlights the complexity of research which involves human participants and their roles as researcher and/or researched. Chapters relate concepts from post-structural, feminist research and frame them within the context of playwork practice through the use of vignettes constructed from stories told by playwork practitioners and the children with whom they work. A valuable addition to an emerging academic field, this book will be of great interest to researchers and students in the fields of playwork research, education and youth studies, early childhood students, and the sociology of education.

Recognizing the potential research with and about young people can have in decision making on multiple levels of policy and service provision, this book provides a key foundation for considering the influence of urban environments on young people, and vice versa.

Children’s play throughout history has been free, spontaneous, and intertwined with work, set in the playgrounds of the fields, streams, and barnyards. Children in cities enjoyed similar forms of play but their playgrounds were the vacant lands and parks. Today, children have become increasingly inactive, abandoning traditional outdoor play for sedentary, indoor cyber play and poor diets. The consequences of play deprivation, the elimination and diminution of recess, and the abandonment of outdoor play are fundamental issues in a growing crisis that threatens the health, development, and welfare of children. This valuable book traces the history of children’s play and play environments from their roots in ancient Greece and Rome to the present time in the high stakes testing environment. Through this exploration, scholar Dr. Joe Frost shows how this history informs where we are today and why we need to re-establish play as a priority. Ultimately, the author proposes active solutions to play deprivation. This book is a must-read for scholars, researchers, and students in the fields of early childhood education and child development.

WINNER: 2004 AESA Critics' Choice Award "With wonderful clarity Maggie MacLure shows how deconstructionism opens new avenues of critical inquiry and understanding for educational researchers. In exposing the hidden, ideological side of terms like clarity, certainty, mastery, and relevance she allows us to see schooling and educational policy in new ways. In so doing she allows us to imagine classrooms as liberating, pedagogical places, as places where new forms of desire, knowledge, and learning take place" Norman K. Denzin, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign This book is both practical and provocative. It demonstrates the insights and the challenges of a discourse-based orientation to educational and social research. Drawing on a variety of educational and social science 'texts' - including press articles, life history interviews, parent-teacher consultations, policy debates and ethnographies - the author shows how knowledge, power, identities and realities are constructed and problematised in discourse. The book also deals with research itself as discursive practice, examining the texts that qualitative researchers produce and consume: reports, monographs, journal articles. Practical examples are included for researchers and graduate students wishing to 'interrogate' their own data from a discourse perspective. The author develops a critical awareness of the researcher's role as writer/reader of texts. The book makes the case for 'discursive literacy' in research. While its primary allegiances are to poststructuralism and deconstruction, it draws from a wide range of disciplines, including interaction sociology, feminist ethnography, literary theory, critical discourse analysis and art history. What holds the book together is the persistent question: how to do educational research and social research within a 'crisis of representation' that has unsettled the relationship between words and worlds?

Inspired by the idea of documentation as a valuable tool for making learning visible, pedagogical narration offers an opportunity to move beyond checklists and quick answers to a more complex understanding of how children learn, and how teachers might facilitate and support that learning in innovative ways. The authors use stories they collected during a collaborative study to offer a range of possibilities for alternative childhood pedagogies. Cutting edge, yet practical; detailed in its analysis, yet inspiring, this book is a boon to the field of early childhood and primary education studies.

The growing regional and international concerns about the educational performance of males reflect a broader social anxiety about the plight of men in general and black men in particular. This concern has culminated in the marginalized male thesis, which has gained considerable academic attention and popular support in the media. In addressing the issue of male underachievement, the book challenges the popularly held assumption that boys fail because girls achieve. Rather than blaming Caribbean females for male underachievement, the book locates male educational performance in the historical context of Caribbean gender relationships, and structural constraints on the development of Caribbean gender identities. UNICEF and the Institute of Social and Economic Research funded the research on gender and Caribbean high school achievement upon which this book is based. Odette Parry and her colleagues conducted extensive in-depth interviews and participant observation research at schools in Jamaica, Barbados, and St Vincent and the Grenadines. After providing the research background and acknowledging the effect of the interviewers' cultural differences, Parry discusses key findings in t

"Even as they see their wages go down and their buying power decrease, many parents are still putting their kids' material desires first. These parents struggle with how to handle children's consumer wants, which continue unabated despite the economic downturn. And, indeed, parents and other adults continue to spend billions of dollars on children every year. Why do children seem to desire so much, so often, so soon, and why do parents capitulate so readily? To determine what forces lie behind the onslaught of Nintendo Wiis and Bratz dolls, Allison J. Pugh spent three years observing and interviewing children and their families. In Longing and Belonging: Parents, Children, and Consumer Culture, Pugh teases out the complex factors that contribute to how we buy, from lunchroom conversations about Game Boys to the stark inequalities facing American children. Pugh finds that children's desires stem less from striving for status or falling victim to advertising than from their yearning to join the conversation at school or in the neighborhood. Most parents respond to children's need to belong by buying the particular goods and experiences that act as passports in children's social worlds, because they sympathize with their children's fear of being different from their peers. Even under financial constraints, families prioritize children "feeling normal". Pugh masterfully illuminates the surprising similarities in the fears and hopes of parents and children from vastly different social contexts, showing that while corporate marketing and materialism play a part in the commodification of childhood, at the heart of the matter is the desire to belong."--pub. desc.