Young children bring rich social, cultural, and political knowledge to school, cultivated in their homes and communities. This knowledge, ranging from household skills to multilingual practices, is often marginalized in schools that value different norms. Drawing from ethnographic studies in Illinois and New York kindergarten classrooms, this…

What does it mean to be "good-at-math," and how is it determined? Cobb et al. (2009) defined the normative identity of mathematics classrooms as the obligations that students must meet to be considered good-at-math. Obligations are negotiated between teachers and students through series of bids. Normative identities reveal distributions…

Moral values constitute abstract concepts, and for students with intellectual disabilities, learning moral values requires methods appropriate for their conditions and social norms. This study was carried out in order to describe the different types and strategies for teaching moral values to students with intellectual disabilities. Questionnaires…

School rules, classroom norms, and social and emotional learning (SEL) modules carefully define, hone, and regulate what counts as "appropriate" and "inappropriate" behavior from students. While the stated intention behind these practices is typically to promote a sense of safety, well-being, and productivity in schooling,…

In recent decades children's rights to exercise choice in educational settings have slowly gained currency. Children's rights advocates highlight the role of choice in empowering children to become critical and productive citizens. However, in this paper, the role of choice in interactions between teachers and students is problematised. Using…

Within the tradition of ethnographic classroom research, this paper studies how pupils with a minority background are disciplined and participate in different school subjects such as Danish, English, math and science in Danish primary and lower secondary school settings. Whereas most research on minority children in classroom contexts focuses…

Using multilevel analyses, we examined the influence of domain (moral, conventional, and personal) and the familiarity of different authority figures (mother, teacher, person in charge, and stranger) in public, school, or home settings in 123 four to seven-year-old Chinese children (M = 5.6 years) in Hong Kong. Children affirmed authority more for…

This dissertation investigates how the intersections of race, class, and gender operate in the everyday teaching and professional norms of middle-class White women teachers--particularly in schools such as the one in this study, where a majority of middle-class, White women teachers serve predominantly low-income, racially and ethnically diverse…