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Establishing the seriousness of learning in the early years of secondary schooling
Author(s) -
Harris Susan,
Rudduck Jean
Publication year - 1993
Publication title -
british journal of educational psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.557
H-Index - 95
eISSN - 2044-8279
pISSN - 0007-0998
DOI - 10.1111/j.2044-8279.1993.tb01061.x
Subject(s) - seriousness , psychology , relation (database) , developmental psychology , social psychology , mathematics education , pedagogy , epistemology , philosophy , database , computer science
This paper is written on the basis of data gathered during the first phase of a longitudinal study involving three comprehensive schools. The study is interview‐based and is designed to contribute to knowledge and understanding of the ways in which students perceive, make sense of, and respond to opportunities for learning during the last four years of compulsory schooling. The strategies that schools use to signal the importance of learning and to establish a sense of institutional membership are discussed and suggestions made about how students are experiencing and interpreting these strategies. The various sub‐plots that are played out within the peer culture in relation to membership and learning are also examined. It is argued that the social and psychological upheavals of the first few terms of secondary schooling (complicated by students' physical and sexual maturation) are so exciting, disturbing and disorientating that it is difficult for students, both individually and collectively, to focus on the seriousness of learning. However, because secondary schooling is constructed and presented as a series of ‘stages’, there are formalised opportunities for students to re‐engage.