Children's playful musicking: Peer culture within a day-care setting in Singapore

In the field of early childhood education, play has become synonymous with curriculum but is sometimes viewed narrowly as a pedagogical tool to enhance child development. However, it is known from a range of multidisciplinary work that child-initiated and child-guided forms and contexts of playing can offer rich insight into diversity in childhood(s), peer cultures and children's meaning-making. This article draws on an ethnographic study that was conducted in a full-day childcare centre in Singapore and focused on children's everyday world of self-initiated play, improvisation and peer culture. Specifically, it presents examples of songs and rhythmic chants created by a group of 4-year-olds . Such ‘musicking’ is a form of social play that illustrates children’s ways of teasing, relating with others and sense-making within their contemporary social world. The article argues for educators to look beyond the instrumental value of play in the preschool curriculum, inviting all to take some time to allow children's multifarious play activities to influence their adult sensibilities.

Staying with discomfort: Early childhood teachers’ emotional themes in relation to children's peer-culture aggression

This research examines one lead teacher's and two assistant teachers’ emotional discomfort as they participated in an eight-month collaborative ethnography of 19 children's peer-culture aggression in an early care and education classroom in the USA. Two questions guided this analysis: (1) What are the emotional themes of teachers in relation to children's peer-culture aggression? (2) How did the teachers utilize an ethic of discomfort when responding to children's peer-culture aggression? Collaborative ethnographic procedures, along with a post-structural account of teacher emotion, were used in a qualitative thematic analysis to determine salient themes and patterns. The data consisted of participant observation, field notes, video recordings of children's play, audio-recorded teacher team meetings, classroom artifacts, informal discussions, and a data-revisiting journal. Over the course of the study, the three teachers moved from resistance to emotional discomfort with children's peer-culture aggression, to a less resistant and more reflexive position toward emotional discomfort and child aggression. This shift occurred as the teachers began to release the goal of certainty and instead acknowledge and accept the unknowing and complexities associated with an ethic of discomfort. The implications center on the importance of teachers’ openness to “staying with” emotional discomfort, as well as making time and space to uncover a range of teacher and child emotions.

The “Burden” of Oppositional Culture Among Black Youth in America

For decades, any scholarly conversation about the academic achievement of youth of color, and especially Black youth, required at least a nod to the widely discussed topic of oppositional culture. In this review, we explore whether Black youth are burdened by a peer culture oppositional to dominant institutions and achievement norms. We begin by focusing on recent research addressing oppositional culture and find little to no support for the main propositions of this theory, even as the ideas remain popular in academic and lay circles. We then turn our attention to other recent research on Black youth's educational experiences and find evidence that these youth might be better understood as burdened by structural, institutional, and interpersonal racism that they and other minoritized students face in school. We conclude by offering suggestions for research moving forward, arguing that it is time to expand the conversation within sociology on Black youth. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Sociology, Volume 47 is July 2021. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

Collective Immersion by Affections

This article explores, through group-interviews and in terms of peer-culture, the ways in which pupils negotiate experiences from school-excursions to three heritage sites, Vadstena Castle, a former Royal Castle connected to the royal dynasty of Vasa; Witches’ forest, the place for interrogation by torture and executions of nine women, accused of witchcraft in 1617, and Linköping Cathedral Ages at the visitor programs “Middle Ages in the Cathedral”. The article, which is part of a larger project on learning processes and historical sites, investigates how pupils collectively load the heritage site with values reflected in immersion by affections, and what significance immersion of affections can have on the pupils’ process of stock of knowledge. The following research questions are asked: What kind of affections are evoked? Which situations and circumstances during the visit at the heritage site, mould impressions and immersion in the collective recalling? By drawing on affection, peer culture and critical heritage studies’ verb “heritaging”, we have studied how the pupils collectively load the heritage sites with values reflected in immersion by affections, and what significance immersion of affections have on the pupils’ process of historical understanding. To understand how the heritage site in terms of a material and physical place loaded with narratives of the past affects the children, the analysis aimed to explore under what circumstances the immersion took place. The article localize three situations that led to surprise and thereby friction between the expected (the stock of knowledge) and what was experienced at the site (the immediate experience), namely conflicts caused by expectations and experiences at the site, conflict caused by replicas in relation to originals, and finally conflict between lived experiences and insights at the site.