Traditionally, research about young children has been shaped by developmental approaches which persist in framing them as incomplete adults. This dissertation proffers a relatively new image of childhood that celebrates the possibilities inherent in childrens multiple ways of knowing. It is drawn from a 2006 study of the playful social language of, and interviews with, grade one children attending an urban Canadian school.<p/> Two questions drive this inquiry: a) What is the significance of childrens social language in a primary classroom? b) What is the role of play within childrens social language and within their culture? To maintain a sense of children as collaborators in research and to bring childrens talk into mainstream education discourse, Bakhtinian concepts of dialogicity and responsivity are foregrounded.<p/> The dissertation begins with a literature review that relates extant theory, research, and praxis to the study of language, discourse, and play. Then, participants perceptions of play, as articulated in the interviews, are presented. Because the study focuses upon childrens ability to make sense of their lived experience, their perceptions of play guide subsequent interpretations. Theory is reconsidered, and interpretative analysis is presented as dialogic response to the childrens ways of knowing, as points of contact between texts, as dialogue. Vignettes, drawn from videotapes of the participants social language in class, provide concrete examples of the role of play within the childrens local culture. Three key ideas emerge: children are able, dialogic interpreters of their lived experience and research participants in their own right; play discourse is agentive behaviour; and agentive play discourse is childrens response to problematic life experiences, for example, the worlds gendered texts.<p/> This study illustrates how childrens playful social talk places an imaginative distance between them and entrenched assumptions about what counts as knowledge. And, it challenges readers to distance themselves from the way things are, to redefine what is considered to be legitimate classroom conversation, and to reconsider how, together, children discursively make meaning and imagine themselves as social actors.<p/>

Traditionally, research about young children has been shaped by developmental approaches which persist in framing them as incomplete adults. This dissertation proffers a relatively new image of childhood that celebrates the possibilities inherent in childrens multiple ways of knowing. It is drawn from a 2006 study of the playful social language of, and interviews with, grade one children attending an urban Canadian school.<p/> Two questions drive this inquiry: a) What is the significance of childrens social language in a primary classroom? b) What is the role of play within childrens social language and within their culture? To maintain a sense of children as collaborators in research and to bring childrens talk into mainstream education discourse, Bakhtinian concepts of dialogicity and responsivity are foregrounded.<p/> The dissertation begins with a literature review that relates extant theory, research, and praxis to the study of language, discourse, and play. Then, participants perceptions of play, as articulated in the interviews, are presented. Because the study focuses upon childrens ability to make sense of their lived experience, their perceptions of play guide subsequent interpretations. Theory is reconsidered, and interpretative analysis is presented as dialogic response to the childrens ways of knowing, as points of contact between texts, as dialogue. Vignettes, drawn from videotapes of the participants social language in class, provide concrete examples of the role of play within the childrens local culture. Three key ideas emerge: children are able, dialogic interpreters of their lived experience and research participants in their own right; play discourse is agentive behaviour; and agentive play discourse is childrens response to problematic life experiences, for example, the worlds gendered texts.<p/> This study illustrates how childrens playful social talk places an imaginative distance between them and entrenched assumptions about what counts as knowledge. And, it challenges readers to distance themselves from the way things are, to redefine what is considered to be legitimate classroom conversation, and to reconsider how, together, children discursively make meaning and imagine themselves as social actors.<p/>

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Importance of seeing and implementing children’s needs in the urban public realm is widely discussed among urban researchers in recent years. It is becoming more challenging, as nowadays there are more than one billion children growing up in cities,which is more than ever before. In this research, I discuss a specific context of a modernist area, Sykhiv, which represents the most widespread type of residential area in Ukraine. The research aims to understand the quality of Sykhiv’s neighborhoods for children and to understand the different perspectives of experts and parents onchild-friendliness in the public realm of Sykhiv. The first research question is dedicatedto parents’ perspectives and children’s spatial practices, the second part is dedicated toexpert views on existing policies, practices, narratives towards child-friendly environment in Sykhiv. The third question represents the synthesis of two previous and reflects on the rethinking of public spaces in Sykhiv in terms of child-friendliness. Three key theories that help to frame this study are: holistic theory on Environmentalchild-friendliness helps to envision a complexity of a phenomenon of child-friendlinessof the environment, critical study on reconceptualizing the playground, which reflects onan extension of the focus of researching a play in the physical environment, andaffordance theory, which bridges the physical environment and human behavior. Theresults showed that Sykhiv has lots of features of a child-friendly environment, noticedboth by experts and parents, however, play infrastructure has numerous disadvantages.The holistic strategy, effective cooperation of all actors (public authorities, civic activists,parents and children, urban planners), awareness and knowledge are lacking in order tocontribute to a child-friendly environment, or at least to prevent negative tendencies tointensity of traffic, shortage of greenery, densening residential areas, etc. Extended safegreen spaces are more likely to perform children’s needs in a public realm, thanplaygrounds that are very frequent but of poor quality in Sykhiv.

Exclusionary school discipline results in students being removed from classrooms as a consequence of their disruptive behavior and may lead to subsequent suspension and/or expulsion. Literature documents that nondominant students, particularly Black males, are disproportionately impacted by exclusionary discipline, to the point that researchers from a variety of critical perspectives consider exclusionary school discipline an oppressive educational practice and condition. Little or no research examines specific teacher-student social interactions within classrooms that influence teachers’ decisions to use or not use exclusionary discipline. Therefore, this study set forth the central research question: In relation to classroom interactions in alternative education settings, what accounts for teachers’ use or non-use of exclusionary discipline with students? A critical social practice theory of learning served as the framework for exploring this question, and a critical microethnographic methodology informed the data collection and analysis. Criterion sampling was used to select four classrooms in the same alternative education school with two teachers who frequently and two who rarely used exclusionary discipline. Nine stages of data collection and reconstructive data analysis were conducted. Data collection involved video recorded classroom observations, digitally recorded interviews of teachers and students discussing selected video segments, and individual teacher interviews. Reconstructive data analysis procedures involved hermeneutic inferencing of possible underlying meanings, critical discourse analysis, interactive power analysis and role analysis, thematic analysis of the interactions in each classroom, and a final comparative analysis of the four classrooms. Four predominant themes of social interaction (resistance, conformism, accommodation, and negotiation) emerged with terminology adapted from Giroux’s (2001) theory of resistance in education and Third Space theory (Gutiérrez, 2008). Four types of power (normative, coercive, interactively established contracts, and charm), based on Carspecken’s (1996) typology, were found in the interactions between teacher and students in varying degrees for different purposes. This research contributes to the knowledge base on teacher-student classroom interactions, specifically in relation to exclusionary discipline. Understanding how the themes and varying power relations influence their decisions and actions may enable teachers to reduce use of exclusionary discipline and remain focused on positive teacher-student academic interactions.