ABSTRACT
The reception class setting, as signalled, is ground which seeks conceptual and practical clarity and is fertile for the study of competing discourses and wildly varying views of what young children are capable of. To study participation on this ground is to doubly challenge the approach of child development which would suggest that children at this point of transition are not yet competent to co-operate in the collective decision-making that participation encompasses. Thus, the study of participation in the reception class is better understood through application of the new paradigm of the sociology of childhood, that of ‘being’ which James and Prout (1997) outline. However, in order to provide a vocabulary to describe the beliefs which inform the child as ‘being’, it is useful to draw on James et al. (1998). This text provides a vocabulary and also possible routes for combining new and differing discourses. In this way, we can begin to make theoretical links between the real and also the conceptualised ‘child’, a potential contradiction which can pose difficulty for empirical research.
