In early childhood education, children's daily practice revolves to a great extent around order and discipline. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork from a Swedish preschool class, the present study further explores how the task of being a teacher's assistant can be critically understood in terms of how gender, discipline and order are expressed in…

In this article, we focus on the interaction in a Year 5 classroom where students fill in a "self-evaluation form" as a preparation for a forthcoming discussion on progress aiming at the production of an Individual Developmental Plan. Drawing on the theoretical concepts of fabrications and performativity, we understand this as an…

The aim of this paper is to investigate children's views and experiences of democracy and pupil participation in relation to everyday school life, and to let their voices be heard on these issues. The data for this paper was derived from two ethnographic research projects conducted in three elementary schools in Sweden. In the classes investigated…

This paper discusses classroom life in formal adult education, specifically rhetoric concerning the idea of the adult learners' own interest as a driving force for learning. Its two objectives are to describe social interaction as related to this andragogical ideal and the conditions for learning and to raise some methodological standpoints in the…