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Early Years Learning, play pedagogy and social class

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journal contribution
posted on 2016-04-25, 10:17 authored by Julie StirrupJulie Stirrup, John Evans, Brian Davies
Despite 50 and more years of ‘progressive education’ in the UK, classed patterns of educational success and failure stubbornly prevail. So how, where and when does it all go wrong for the many children who continue to fail or underachieve? Drawing on the work of Basil Bernstein this paper centers processes within early years’ education, which are claimed to help launch children on careers as either educational successes or failures. Our data suggest that in the progressive play pedagogies of Early Years Education (EYE) children more or less happily play their lives away, in the process learning their position in social and ability hierarchies that help define their future careers in and outside schools. That such hierarchies prevail is neither fault of teachers nor parents. Indeed, it is what EYE settings are legitimized to do; sieve and sort, make children ‘school ready’, pliant and prepared for a lifetime of learning to succeed or fail.

History

Published in

British Journal of Sociology of Education

Volume

38

Issue

6

Pages

872-886

Citation

STIRRUP, J., EVANS, J. and DAVIES, B., 2017. Early Years Learning, play pedagogy and social class. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 38 (6), pp. 872-886.

Publisher

© Taylor & Francis

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Acceptance date

2016-04-12

Publication date

2016-06-02

Copyright date

2017

Notes

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in British Journal of Sociology of Education on 02 Jun 2016, available online: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01425692.2016.1182010

ISSN

0142-5692

eISSN

1465-3346

Language

  • en