No abstract

No abstract

Biography and life history are currently enjoying a revival in educational research and development. This article considers the implications of adopting a ‘biographical attitude’ to research and policy issues, and explores the notion of identity as an organising principle in teachers' jobs and lives. Identity, it is suggested, can be seen as a kind of argument—a resource that people use to explain, justify and make sense of themselves in relation to others, and to the world at large. While identity is a site of permanent struggle for everyone, teachers may be undergoing a particularly acute crisis of identity, as the old models and exemplars of teacherhood disintegrate under contemporary social and economic pressures. The article is based upon an empirical study of 69 primary and secondary teachers.

The article considers the productive capacity for wonder that resides and radiates in data, or rather in the entangled relation of data-and-researcher. Wonder is not necessarily a safe, comforting, or uncomplicatedly positive affect. It shades into curiosity, horror, fascination, disgust, and monstrosity. But the price paid for the ruin caused—to epistemic certainty or the comforts of a well-wrought coding scheme—is, after Massumi (2002, p. 19), the privilege of a headache. Not the answer to a question, but the astute crafting of a problem and a challenge: what next?

How does it happen that some children acquire a reputation as a 'problem' in school? The article discusses some findings of a qualitative study involving children in the Reception year (ages 4-5). The research focused on problematic behaviour as this emerged within, and was shaped by, the culture of the classroom. A key question for the research was: what makes it difficult for some children to be, and to be recognised as, good students? Using an analytic framework derived from discourse and conversation analysis, we identify some critical factors in the production of reputation, including: the 'discursive framing' of behaviour; the public nature of classroom discipline; the linking of behaviour, learning and emotions; the interactional complexities of being (seen to be) good, and the demands on children of passing as the 'proper child' required by prevailing discourses of normal development, as coded in UK early years curriculum policy and pedagogy.