Search results

The purpose of this paper is to understand, from children's perspectives, the commercial marketing strategy of selling breakfast cereals with “insert toys” targeted at children.

The study is based on four focus group interviews conducted with 16 children (8‐9 years of age) concerning 18 different breakfast cereal packages. The theoretical framework integrates childhood sociology, critical discourse analysis and talk‐in‐interaction. This theoretical and methodological combination is used to show how children, in local micro settings of talk, make use of the discourses that are available to them to produce and reproduce social and cultural values about marketing with “insert toys”.

The present findings suggest that, from children's perspectives, “insert toys” are constituted by cultural and social patterns extending far beyond the “insert toy” itself. For example, the analysis shows that it is not biological age that defines what and how consumption is understood.

The focus group material provides understandings of marketing strategies and consumption practices from children's perspectives. When the children talk about children and adults, hybrid agents of the “child‐adult”, the “adult‐child” and the “childish child” are constructed. These hybrids contradict research that dichotomizes children and adults likewise children's understandings of consumption based on age stages. Accordingly, age is rationalized into an empirically investigated category rather than being used as a preset category set out to explain children's behaviours.

Analysis of the focus group interactions shows that the way the market and marketing as well as children and adults are talked about is crucial to understanding children's and parents' actions as consumers.

Lawrence Angus is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education, Monash University, Melbourne. Much of his work has been conducted in relation to educational policy and institutional restructuring, which he connects with issues of social formation, culture and equity. Angus’s current interest is in the part played by schools in the construction and legitimation of various forms of culture and knowledge associated with the use of new technologies, and the implications of these for educational practice, inclusion/exclusion and (dis)advantage. Angus has a strong research and publication record in socio-cultural analysis of processes of schooling, and a record of strong policy work including participation in government advisory committees. His analyses of educational processes and practices and what these mean for the conceptualisation of educational policy and educational reform have been especially influential. His most recent book, with Terri Seddon, is Reshaping Australian education: Beyond nostalgia (Australian Council for Educational Research, 2000). He has extensive experience of qualitative research and has published internationally on methodological debates and innovations in critical ethnography.Karin Aronsson is a professor at the Department of Child Studies, Linkööping University. Much of her research concerns multiparty conversations in institutional settings, e.g. family therapy talk, pediatric interviews, and classroom conversations. Other investigations concern codeswitching in bilingual children’s play, and language shift phenomena in relation to sibling caretaking. Several of her studies map the social choreography of talk-in-interaction along specific continua; e.g. formality-informality and alignment-disalignment. A series of recent studies concern classrooms dialogues as arenas for informal learning.Dennis Beach is a senior research fellow and associate Professor at the Department of Education Gööteborg University, Sweden. His main responsibilities are for the development of ethnographic research methods at the department, the supervision of Ph.D. research and teaching within the sociology of education. Together with Marie Carlson from the Department of Sociology at Göötborg University, Beach is currently leading a recently funded Research Council project on the restructuring of adult education and the collective renewal of Swedish For Immigrants Education (SFI). His previous research projects have been in the restructuring of upper-secondary education and of various programmes within university-based vocational education.Shereen Benjamin has worked as a class teacher of young children in primary and special schools, and as a learning support teacher in the secondary school in which her doctoral research was based. Her Ph.D. was completed at the London University Institute of Education, with the support of an Economic and Social Research Council studentship. She is currently lecturing in the Inclusive and Special Education division of the University of Birmingham. She is interested in the intersection of gender/sexuality, social class and ‘special educational needs’, and is researching inclusive school cultures in collaboration with practising teachers and with colleagues from The Open University and Leeds Metropolitan University.Jeff Bezemer (1976), MA, studied Language and Culture at Tilburg University in the Netherlands. In 1999, he graduated with a specialisation in Dutch as a Second Language. Since 1999, he is affiliated to Babylon, Center for Studies of Multilingualism in the Multicultural Society at Tilburg University. After having been involved in empirical-analytical studies on school achievements of islamic school pupils, and adult lingua-franca-interaction, he is currently engaged in an international-comparative, empirical-interpretative Ph.D. project on multilingualism and education in a multi-ethnic, Dutch primary school.Diann Eley is currently a Research Associate at Loughborough University in the Department of Physical Education, Sport Science and Recreation Management. Her main research interest is the social-psychology of volunteerism and leadership in young people and sport.Laura Dawn Greathouse received her doctorate, from the State University of New York at Binghamton in 2000, for her dissertation dealing with refugee and immigrant students in English for Speakers of Other Languages classrooms. Her research focus remains on inequality and education, especially in linguistic minorities. In her current position as assistant professor of anthropology at California State University, Fullerton, she is responsible for the administration of the credentialing of students with a Bachelor’s degree in anthropology to teach at the elementary or secondary educational levels. She is currently working on social acceptance of Middle Eastern descent students in a post-September, 2001 America.Caroline Hudson’s research interests include basic skills provision for offenders; the relationships between basic skills, offending behaviour and social exclusion; school attendance and truancy; evidence-based policy; the effectiveness of basing police officers in schools; and the literacy demands of the secondary school curriculum. Her doctoral ethnography was of young people’s perceptions of the relationships between their family structure (intact nuclear, reordered nuclear and single-parent) and their experience of family and schooling. Formerly a secondary school English teacher, Caroline has worked as a Research Officer at the University of Oxford, and is currently Basic Skills Development Advisor at the Home Office National Probation Directorate.Bob Jeffrey is a research fellow in the Faculty of Education and Language Studies at The Open University. He was a primary teacher for twenty years before joining The Open University as a project officer on an Economic and Social Science Research Council (ESRC) research project concerned with creative teaching in primary schools directed by Professor Peter Woods. Under the same direction he gained another ESRC research award focusing on the effects of Ofsted inspections on primary teachers. He has continued his research in three areas, creative teaching and learning, primary teacher’s work and research methodology, publishing extensively both individually and with a team within his university faculty. He has also established extensive European connections in the area of creativity and ethnography through the administration of email discussion lists, co-ordinating an ethnography network at the European Conference of Educational Research, submitting European Union research proposals, and organising a Special Interest Group within BERA. He has been invited to give papers at Padua University, Italy and to run methodology workshops in Tallinn, Estonia.Allyson Julé (Ph.D., University of Surrey Roehampton, London, U.K.) currently teaches in the TESL Certificate Program at Trinity Western University, Langley, British Columbia and at the English Language Institute at the University of British Columbia, Canada. Her research interests include gender in ESL; the Punjabi Sikh experience in Canada; ethnography in education; and classroom talk analysis in teacher education.David Kirk is with the Department of Physical Education, Sports Science and Recreation Management at Loughborough University. His research interests include educational reform and curriculum development in physical education, young people in sport, and situated learning in physical education and sport. His most recent book is ‘Schooling Bodies: School Practice and Public Discourse, 1880–1950’ (Leicester University Press, 1998).Eamonn McKeown is a Senior Research Fellow in Psychiatry and Behavioural Sciences at University College London. His background is in Social Anthropology having completed both his first degree and Ph.D. at Queen’s University, Belfast and he has previously been employed as a Research Fellow and tutor at Queen’s University, Belfast and University College Swansea. He has published on a range of educational research issues (selection in Northern Ireland, male recruits to primary school teaching, gender and science teaching, occupational sex-typing among primary school children) and has conducted extended fieldwork in Papua New Guinea examining the relationship between formal education and local culture and in New York investigating the nature of contemporary Irish-American identity. He is currently completing a book on literacy appropriation in a Papua New Guinean highlands community.Ann MacPhail is currently a lecturer in the Department of Physical Education and Sport Sciences, University of Limerick. Her main interests revolve around young people in sport and curriculum development in PE During the past three years Ann has been involved in a number of projects involved with school PE and sport, including model-based teaching and learning in school PE and an ethnography of junior sport participation.Ilana Snyder is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education, Monash University, Australia. Her research focuses on changes to literacy, pedagogical and cultural practices associated with the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs). Four books, Hypertext (Melbourne University Press & New York University Press, 1996), Page to Screen (Allen & Unwin and Routledge, 1997), Teachers and Technoliteracy (Allen & Unwin, 2000), co-authored with Colin Lankshear, and Silicon Literacies (Routledge 2002) explore these changes. In collaboration with Simon Marginson and Tania Lewis, her current research includes a three-year Australian Research Council-funded project examining the use of ICTs in higher education in Australia. The focus is on innovation at the interface between pedagogical and organisational practices. She is also working on the application of Raymond William’s ideas about technology and cultural form to a study of the Internet.Anna Sparrman has a professional background as a museum curator. She received her Ph.D., in 2002, from the Department of Child Studies at Linkööping University, Sweden. The thesis was concerned with images and visuality in children’s culture as well as commercial childhood. Her main research interest is visual culture in everyday life. She now works as a researcher at the Department of Child Studies.Wendy Sutherland-Smith is a research associate at the Faculty of Education, Monash University, Melbourne, where she is undertaking doctoral studies in Internet literacy practices of tertiary English as a Second Language (ESL) students. She teaches international students entering tertiary studies, where she focuses on writing processes and issues of intellectual property. In her doctoral work, Sutherland-Smith is particularly interested in Bourdieu’s notions of symbolic violence, cultural capital, habitus and field, and applies these critically in analyses of international students and their interactions with academic culture, print-centred and internet learning styles, and issues of intellectual property. She has published articles in The Reading Teacher and Prospect on her research of international students’ reading practices in paper-text compared to hyper-text environments.Geoffrey Walford is Professor of Education Policy and a Fellow of Green College at the University of Oxford. He was previously Senior Lecturer in Sociology and Education Policy at Aston Business School, Aston University, Birmingham. His recent books include: Affirming the Comprehensive Ideal (Falmer, 1997, edited with Richard Pring), Doing Research about Education (Falmer, 1998, editor) Durkheim and Modern Education (Routledge, 1998, edited with W S F Pickering), Policy and Politics in Education (Ashgate, 2000) and Doing Qualitative Educational Research (Continuum, 2001). His research foci are the relationships between central government policy and local processes of implementation, choice of schools, religiously-based schools and ethnographic research methodology. He recently directed a Spencer Foundation funded comparative project on faith-based schools in England and the Netherlands.

David Buckingham (1998, 2000) has recently argued against rigid dichotomies in the contemporary study of commercial artefacts and childhood culture. On the one hand, children are seen as easy victims of commercial exploitation from big companies, and on the other, they are seen as highly competent agents, immune to any outside influence. Both views feature different types of romanticism. The view of children as victims is partly created around Victorian ideas of childhood innocence, whereas the romantic view of the active child sees children as open, creative, and competent learners, who effortlessly acquire new literacies, including media literacies. Such a view is partly implicitly inscribed into the Swedish School Curriculum (1998) (Läroplan för det obligatoriska skolväsendet, förskoleklassen och fritidshemmet. Lpo 94. [Curriculum for the compulsory school, the pre-school class and the after-school centre. Lpo 94]). In his criticism of the passive-active dichotomy, Buckingham argues in favour of studies of actual practices, that is, what young people actually do with artefacts and media, instead of empty speculations, far away from children’s play arenas. Buckingham’s own studies are mainly based on group interviews with children in the U.K., where he has analysed what was said on a micro level. A fundamental principle in his research is that children’s agency can be seen in their language use. Also, he advocates that we contextualize children’s activities by analysing the social processes of which they form a part. One way of doing this is to relate a study of children’s everyday interactions to media debates and to changes in our views of children as social agents (Buckingham, 1994).

As a significant part of childhood material culture, children's clothes contribute to shaping their social identity and gender, as well as to developing and supporting their interactions with their environment related to their age. The focus on children's education and well-being is essential. Their voices should be emphasised in the interest of promoting an inclusive future in both research on children's material culture and in practice. However, despite the daily nature of children's interaction with clothing, their relationship with clothes is ignored and methods to support an analysis of it are lacking. An investigation of children's clothing behaviour is needed to better understand children's agency, to influence industry experts and to encourage policymakers to engage more sustainably with children's fashion. IN2FROCC (Interdisciplinary and International Network for Research on Children and Clothing) is comprised of historians, anthropologists, sociologists, ethnologists, museum curators, childhood practitioners, designers, industry representatives and children united in an investigation into children's clothes around the globe, historically and in social ecosystems. This network seeks to engage in an innovative, inclusive and organic manner with current research on children's dress codes, fashion and clothes to establish a deeper understanding of children's clothing interactions. This chapter will present the initial reflections and actions of this network, creating impactful methods for participative children's clothing culture and design.

Understanding the concepts of policy and policy-making is far from straightforward. There has now been considerable empirical and theoretical work on the nature of policy development and implementation, and it is abundantly clear that the whole process is far more complex, dynamic, and interactive than any of the traditional linear or staged models suggest. There have been many attempts to describe and analyses this complexity, and the models produced have frequently been highly contested. However, it is evident that policy is not made ‘once and for all’ by people called ‘policy-makers’. Any attempt to make change within the educational system is the result of compromise and circumstance and, even where the change is incorporated in law, the nature of that change that results is often far from clear. This ambiguity and lack of clarity is not necessarily due to poor drafting of the law, but is usually the result of the constraints within which most legislation comes to be agreed.