Children's lived experiences of 'ability' in the Key Stage One classroom

• Main Author: Gripton, Catherine J
• Format: Dissertation
• Language: English
• Published: Nottingham Trent University 2018

This empirical research examined evidence of children's lived experience of 'ability' from two case study classes of 5-7 year olds in primary schools in England. 'Thick description' (Geertz 1973) of the children's lived experiences was created using children's classroom tours, classroom representations and interviews alongside non-participant observation of everyday classroom life and interviews with the class teachers. For these children, findings are that their lived experience of 'ability' is highly individual and shaped by the scope of their awareness and their attention to an individual combination of features of classroom life, particularly structural, social and pedagogic. The class teachers partially shaped the children's experiences through their teaching choices, underlying beliefs about 'ability' and own experiences (as a child and as a teacher) but this varied significantly for each child depending upon how their individual lived experience was shaped. The findings from these two classes suggest that policy and research into 'ability' in early schooling should be considered with a recognition that there could be significant variation in how this is experienced by individual children. Therefore, in making teaching choices at classroom level we might consider a wide range of aspects as potentially influential in shaping children's experiences of 'ability' and therefore pay close attention to the individual children in the class and what they attend to most in their classroom, as well as well as our own beliefs and experiences.