My main aim of this assignment is to provide a critical assessment of two articles with reference to wider reading. I will also be offering my own assessment and reflections on how my overall study has developed my understanding of aspects of teaching and learning in schools.
The first article is edited by Phillip Jackson, and is titled 'life in classrooms' .The author of this article draws attention to the reality of classrooms by highlighting the experience of pupils. He sets out the nature of school attendance and of the school context: schooling is compulsory; a pupil is one in the classroom crowd; is subject to praise or sanction, and is constrained by the power of the teacher.
The second article consists of two parts. The first part is an excerpt from the introduction of 'The school I'd like' by Blishen, E. (1969) where the author mentions about a public competition which was conducted in 1967, in which kids across England wrote essays about "The school that I'd like".
Teacher in primary school in northern Laos
English: Nepalese teacher and schoolchildren in Po...
English: Jewish Children with their Teacher in Sam...The second section of the article is from 'The Guardian' newspaper which in 2001 launched a similar competition in which young people were asked to imagine their ideal school.
The main aims of both of the sections in the second article is to bring forward children's opinions regarding school and urge the leaders of the educational system to make changes in order to accommodate the children more appropriately. Blishen (1969) expresses this feeling when he says referring to the massive response from the entrants "it amounted to an enormous, remarkably good-humoured earnest, frequently passionate and, at best, highly intelligent plea for a new order in our schools." Similarly, the editor of the 2001 article in 'The Guardian': Dea Birkett makes the same point 'Entrusted with designing their own schools, where...