Peter Freebody – författare

What is a child?How is the concept of childhood defined?This book aims to explore these perennial and complex questions by looking at the way in which society constructs and understands childhood. The authors focus in particular on the school, a key location within which social and cultural notions of childhood are defined and performed.The book is divided into three major parts:Part 1 frames the accepted notions of childhood and schooling, and introduces ethnomethodological analysis as a tool to rethink current versions of the child.Part 2 focuses on how school students become members of a category within the institution of the classroom. The authors explore this idea through transcripts of talk between teachers and students, and amongst students themselves in two classroom studies.Part 3 looks at the materials of education, concentrating specifically on children''s texts. The authors examine how such texts portray a notion of the child within the story, and also assume a notion of the child as reader of the story.This important book shows how much is at stake for children in accepting adults'' deep-seated notions of childhood. It will be of great interest to educational researchers and policy makers, sociologists of childhood, teachers and student teachers.

What is a child?How is the concept of childhood defined?This book aims to explore these perennial and complex questions by looking at the way in which society constructs and understands childhood. The authors focus in particular on the school, a key location within which social and cultural notions of childhood are defined and performed.The book is divided into three major parts:Part 1 frames the accepted notions of childhood and schooling, and introduces ethnomethodological analysis as a tool to rethink current versions of the child.Part 2 focuses on how school students become members of a category within the institution of the classroom. The authors explore this idea through transcripts of talk between teachers and students, and amongst students themselves in two classroom studies.Part 3 looks at the materials of education, concentrating specifically on children''s texts. The authors examine how such texts portray a notion of the child within the story, and also assume a notion of the child as reader of the story.This important book shows how much is at stake for children in accepting adults'' deep-seated notions of childhood. It will be of great interest to educational researchers and policy makers, sociologists of childhood, teachers and student teachers.

This book is the outcome of a colloquium series organized by The University of Sydney in which leading and emerging researchers were invited to name what they took to be the deep flaws at the heart of contemporary educational and policy and practice in Australia and globally — to voice their potentially ‘heretical’ views on what most urgently needs to be done. The chapters in this collection are paired to offer two takes on each topic, from supplementing to critiquing to countering and most points in between.

The issues addressed in this volume include: the place of education in national and international marketplaces, mass testing and standardisation, the future of ‘multiculturalism’ in schools, the public funding of private schools, the complicated relationship between evidence and policy and the shifting politics of inequality. This book is based on the idea that recognising deep disagreements on big issues is a necessary accompaniment to imagining and developing productive ways forward.