ABSTRACT
Naseem is Nazma's elder sister, the second oldest child in the family. She is nine years old and in a year four class at the same school.
The session starts with a whole-class discussion about geography work on the British Isles. Naseem sits with a group of friends, passive and disengaged. The class then return to their desks and continue the on-going classwork which was introduced earlier in the week. The task is to complete a worksheet on the countries in the British Isles, to calculate the area of each using squared paper and to answer a set of questions about the map. Most of the children in the class are working in pairs or small groups, but Naseem is sitting on her own. She has been working on this worksheet for several days, but is still counting the small squares on the map surface of each country and finding the task difficult. During the session, she is easily distracted and off task for much of the time. She sits for long periods of time not engaged in the work and not asking for help from the classteacher or her peers. Later in the afternoon session when tackling the worksheet, it is evident that the question 'how many times bigger than Northern Ireland is the Republic of Ireland?' is difficult for her to understand. She sits at her desk with her hand held up, asking for help. After several minutes the class teacher asks the class to tidy up. The children assemble on the carpet at the end of the afternoon and go home.
