Series:

Routledge Library Editions: Education

3 total works

Cover of Sociology and the School (RLE Edu L)

This is an introduction to interactionist work in education during the 1970s and 80s. The interactionist viewpoint concentrates on how people construct meanings in the ebb and flow of everyday life - what they think and do, how they react to one another - and has in recent years established itself as one of the leading approaches in education. It has generated illuminating research studies which, by being firmly based in the real world of teaching and dealing with the fine-grained details of school life, have helped to break down the barriers between teacher and researcher.

This volume presents the results of this valuable work, within a coherent theoretical framework, by focusing on the major interactionist concepts of situation, perspectives, cultures, strategies, negotiation and careers. By bringing them together in this way, the author demonstrates their collective potential for the deeper understanding of school life and the possibilities for sociological theory. His book therefore offers both a summary of and a reflection on achievement in the area of interactionism as it relates to schools.

Cover of The Divided School

The Divided School

by Peter Woods

Published 1 March 1979
In this ethnographic study of a secondary school in the UK, the author presents an incisive account of school life from the various points of view of the pupils, teachers and parents. He describes and analyses major areas of experience and methods of adapting to school for both the children and their teachers; school experience is shown to be widely varying from boredom, despair and humiliation, to gaiety, exultation and comradeship some of it officially and some of it unofficially sponsored. The description reveals a number of marked and interpenetrating divisions within schools: between teachers and pupils, parents and teachers, parents and children and between pupils themselves. These divisions are explored, analysed and related both to institutional factors and to factors outside the school. The study suggests how these factors influence pupil and teacher strategies, and hence how the details of school life relates to wider society.

Cover of Critical Events in Teaching & Learning

This volume describes and analyses exceptional educational events - periods of particularly effective teaching representing ultimates in teacher and pupil educational experience. The events themselves are reconstructed in the book through teacher and pupil voices and through documentation. A model of 'critical event' is derived from the study, which might serve as a possible framework for understanding other such occurrences in schools.