ABSTRACT
To be and have friends is a fundamental human interest and concern. The traditional refrain that ‘schooldays are the happiest days of our lives,’ as Woods (1990) argues, frequently owes more to the joys of being and having friends than it does to the pleasures and rewards of academic learning. Yet, ironically, it is this popular perception that frequently obscures the promise of children’s friendships as motivational contexts for social learning in the present culture of schools and classrooms. Why children’s friendships should be an important topic of scientific investigation has a long history in psychological studies of children’s early social experiences (see Hartup, 1983), and a comparatively more recent history in sociological studies of childhood (Ambert, 1986; Corsaro, 1985, 1994; Corsaro and Eder, 1990; Denzin, 1977; James and Prout, 1990; Mayall, 1994). The importance of children’s friendships has been rehearsed in late nineteenthand early twentieth-century speculative writings on the effects of social groups on human behavior by writers such as Thomas Horton Cooley, Sigmund Freud, Emile Durkheim, Jean Piaget, and George Herbert Mead (see Renshaw, 1981). In the 1930s, Lewin’s seminal field-experimentalist approach for identifying the determinants of social interaction (Lewin and Lippitt, 1938; Lewin, Lippitt, and
White, 1939) firmly established ‘dominant and dominating’ (James and Prout, 1990, p. 10) developmental trajectories in the research on children’s peer cultures. This dominance has endured, admittedly to a lesser extent, up to the present day.
