Becoming a person in the preschool: creating integrated gender, school culture, and peer culture positionings

Abstract

This article explores social processes related to the social competence of children evident in preschools and to researchers' collaborative efforts to understand it. Drawing examples from the authors' respective programs of research in the United States and Australia, we demonstrate how preschool children struggle to construct their full social membership in classroom discourse -to achieve the often simultaneous accomplishment of oneself as a student, peer, and gendered person. With regard to research processes, we demonstrate how researchers with different but compatible theoretical/research perspectives may widen their interpretive lenses through collaborative dialogue, the yield being a more multifaceted vision of young children's social competence.

Classroom Community and Peer Culture in Kindergarten

“…Within the classroom community, children display the need to express individuality, voice their identities, and empower themselves with a sense of agency. Researchers (Corsaro 1985;Hatch 1989;Fernie et al 1993) posit that in the early childhood setting, there is the larger organizational culture, the classroom culture, and the peer culture. Children's lives are patterned and constructed over time as the children interact with each other to create their own peer culture.…”

Constituting Social Membership: Two Readings of Talk in an Early Childhood Classroom

“…His claim of solidarity presents a model of unified masculine version of the talk and interaction. (Davies, 1993). At the same time, however, the teacher is subjecting…”

“…Subject positions can be made visible to others and they can be taken up or resisted by the person (Fairclough, 1989;Fernie, Davies, Kantor, and McMurray, 1993). Particular subject positions taken up by participants are reflected and constituted by discourses (Fairclough, 1989;Hollway, 1984).…”

“…David to a set of values that will constrain his choices (Davies, 1993). David, in Turn 32, knows the parameters within which he may respond, and consequently he chooses his response to fall within what is accepted by the teacher.…”

“…According to Davies (1989:1), children use talk not only to communicate, but to "constitute themselves as persons in relation to others in the social world". According to this, people do not passively accept the messages of society; instead, they use language to define their sense of selves, to construct their subjectivities and to position others (Berger and Luckmann, 1966;Davies, 1993;Swann, 1992;Weedon, 1987).…”