How does it happen that some children acquire a reputation as a 'problem' in school? The article discusses some findings of a qualitative study involving children in the Reception year (ages 4-5). The research focused on problematic behaviour as this emerged within, and was shaped by, the culture of the classroom. A key question for the research was: what makes it difficult for some children to be, and to be recognised as, good students? Using an analytic framework derived from discourse and conversation analysis, we identify some critical factors in the production of reputation, including: the 'discursive framing' of behaviour; the public nature of classroom discipline; the linking of behaviour, learning and emotions; the interactional complexities of being (seen to be) good, and the demands on children of passing as the 'proper child' required by prevailing discourses of normal development, as coded in UK early years curriculum policy and pedagogy.

The article engages with the problematic nature of silence and its tendency to trouble qualitative inquiry. Silence is frequently read as resistance—as an impediment to analysis or the emergence of an authentic voice. Rather than seeking methodological remedies for such impediments, the article dwells on, and in, the recalcitrance of silence. The authors read silence, via Derrida and Freud, as the trace of something Other at the heart of utterance—something intractable, unspeakable, unreasonable, unanalyzable. Silence confounds interpretation and manifests, intolerably, the illusory status of speech as full “presence” or living voice. Yet it also incites the search for meaning and is therefore productive. How might Method work with the alterity of silence, rather than seeking to cure or compensate for its necessary insufficiencies? The article is organized around three examples or parables of silence. Humor gets tangled up in the text further on.

This paper argues for an expanded field of inquiry to conceptualise young children in museums. Drawing on Murris' [2016. The Post-Human Child: Educational Transformation Through Philosophy with Picturebooks. London: Routledge] analysis of childhood constructions, we discuss how cognitive and socio-constructivist models of the child dominate childhood and museum studies. We argue for the potential of Murris' figure of the posthuman child to reconceptualise children in museums. This perspective offers a greater focus on the potency of objects themselves, and the animacy of the non-human aspects of the museum. It is also underpinned by a theoretical shift from representation to nonrepresentation [Anderson, B., and P. Harrison. (2010) "The Promise of Non-representational Theories." In Taking-place: Non-representational Theories and Geography. Farnham: Ashgate], presenting us with new ways to address questions such as 'what does that mean?' when we observe children's learning in museums. Working with data that has proved resistant to interpretation across a range of research projects, what we call 'sticky data', we elaborate on three themes emerging from this reconceptualisation: vibrancy, repetition and movement.

This article reports on research into primary student teachers' understanding of mathematics and its teaching undertaken at the Manchester Metropolitan University and funded by the Economic and Social Research Council. The research set out to investigate the ways in which non-specialist student teachers conceptualise mathematics and its teaching and how their views evolve as they progress through an initial training course. The study has shown how the mathematical understanding of such students is, in the first instance, embedded in a strongly affective account of their own mathematical experiences in schools, where mathematics was often seen as difficult and threatening. College training successfully nurtures a more positive attitude to mathematics as a subject, albeit couched in a pedagogically oriented frame. In later stages of training however, their conceptions of mathematics and its teaching are subsumed within the organisational concerns of placement schools and school experience tutors, and shaped by commercial schemes. It is suggested that alternative conceptions of mathematics assumed at different stages of this training appear incommensurable. A theoretical framework is offered as an approach to reconciling this conflict. This demonstrates how three potential dichotomies, phenomenological/official versions of mathematics, discovery/transmission conceptions of mathematics teaching, and perceptual/structural understandings of the mathematics teacher's task can be seen as productive dualities harnessing both qualitative and quantitative perspectives.

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