Everyday lessons of North American preschoolers : social class as cultural community
- UNCG Author/Contributor (non-UNCG co-authors, if there are any, appear on document)
- Sarah Elizabeth Putnam (Creator)
- Institution
- The University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG )
- Web Site: http://library.uncg.edu/
- Advisor
- Jonathan Tudge
Abstract: Twenty children (11 middle and 9 working class) aged 28 to 48 months residing in one city were observed for twenty hours each over 6-7 days. Observations were unobtrusive and naturalistic. Coding focused on the activities going on around the children, their involvement in activity, their roles and their social partners' roles in activity, how the activities began, and aspects of the physical and social environment. The focus of this dissertation is the lessons in which children were involved and their play with academic materials. Compared to their working-class counterparts, middle-class children engaged in more lessons and initiated more skill-nature lessons alone and with a social partner. Middle-class children also engaged in more play with academic objects in their own environs than at school. Girls were involved in significantly more interpersonal lessons than were boys. Middle-class children were also somewhat more likely, compared to their working-class counterparts to have more academic and skill-nature lessons available to them, and they were also somewhat more likely to initiate academic lessons and to initiate their own involvement in skill-nature lessons.
Everyday lessons of North American preschoolers : social class as cultural community
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Created on 1/1/1995
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Additional Information
- Publication
- Dissertation
- Language: English
- Date: 1995
- Subjects
- Play assessment (Child psychology)
- Preschool children
- Education, Preschool $x Social aspects