Primary Education Popular Educator

The four books are intended to be used by students taking BEd or PGCE courses and by teachers in service, taking diploma or higher degree courses in primary education. The material extracted can by used by tutors as a focus for seminars or as reading to back up lectures, and by students as a source for essays or as a starting point for further reading. The books are not intended to be read straight through from cover to cover but can be selectively and flexibly used at various stages in the course. For convenience, the extracts have been organized into a number of sections. Volume 1 comprises extracts which examine primary education from historical, ideological, philosophical, sociological and psychological perspectives. Volume 2 deals with curriculum studies, Volume 3 with school organization and management and Volume 4 with teaching and classroom studies. Because of limitations of space, primary education has been confined to the education of children aged 5 to 11, though the compilers acknowledge that in doing so they may offend those teachers in nursery or middle schools who regard themselves, justifiably, as primary practitioners.

Getting to the heart of primary education: six contrasting studies of teachers, teaching, learning and classroom discourse, all set in a historical frame. Contains extended lesson transcripts for re-analysis. The five studies in this book span the tumultuous period from the mid 1980s to the mid 1990s. This was a time when the dominant educational ideas and practices of the previous two decades were being questioned and primary teachers were being catapulted from the Plowden era into the very different ethos of the National Curriculum. The first four studies portray the ideas, practices and dilemmas of primary teaching at different points during this period. They also exemplify different approaches to classroom research, though all of them stay close to the interactions between teacher and child which are central to learning. They thus raise educational questions which are perennial and fundamental, rather than tied to policy or fashion. The final study uses a broader brush to provide a historical framework for understanding the particular blend of change and continuity which characterises English primary education as a whole.