TOWARDS AN UNDERSTANDING OF CHILDREN'S ACCOUNTS OF LEARNING IN PRIMARY SCHOOLS

Abstract

TOWARDS AN UNDERSTANDING OF CHILDREN'S ACCOUNTS OF LEARNING IN PRIMARY SCHOOLS A thesis submitted to the University of Manchester for the degree of Doctor of Education (EdD) in the Faculty of Humanities James W Twigg, August 2021 The study is located within the field of socially critical school improvement, where the intersection of the educational equity and poverty and school improvement fields provides a fruitful arena for examining what children actually report makes the biggest difference to their learning. Specifically, the project examines aspects of children's homelife and school-life through the utilisation of two innovative conceptualisations: the Virtual School Bag (VSB) and the Virtual School Desk (VSD). The VSB explains which aspects of a child's life experience are brought to school each day from home; and the VSD explains what schools do to improve learning. These two conceptualisations are used to design the fieldwork, analyse the data, and are the site where the original contribution to knowledge is made. The fieldwork is a case study entitled the Children's Accounts of Learning project (CAL project). It is based on reported accounts by children of their learning in four schools in one local authority in England. Research participants are 39 Year 5 children from across four schools, where an original Q Sort method has been designed and used to obtain views about what is important to their learning. In addition, the approach to teaching and learning adopted by each of the four schools has been researched through (a) interviews with each headteacher; and (b) organisational/school primary documentary sources. The headteacher interviews and documentary evidence are used to present a narrative portrait for each school and the children's responses to the Q Sort are shown as factor statements. The VSB and VSD models are deployed to analyse and explain the data, where a further novel model has been produced as a core contribution to the research field: The Virtual Village (VV). The findings from the CAL project point to the supportive micro-interactions between parent and child, and teacher and child which contribute to the child's agency and support the mediation of the child's VSB on to the VSD. The Virtual Village (VV) spans the dynamic space between home and school and the internal conditions of the Virtual Village give further support to the mediation the VSB on to the VSD through a community-centric approach to school improvement. The implications of this research for the socially critical school improvement field, together with recommendations for research, policy and practice are presented.

Date of Award	1 Aug 2022
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	The University of Manchester
Supervisor	Helen Gunter (Supervisor) & Steven Courtney (Supervisor)