Hi everyone,

I wanted to make a brief introduction to my part of the workshop session tomorrow. I will look at those two questions while we look at some excerpts from the interviews I conducted with parents. I will bring in those texts tomorrow but meanwhile, if you have time, can you think about these questions:

What does how parents talk about the way their children are disagreeing with them, or resisting to them, about their out of school time arrangements tell us?

What does the way in which parents evoke their children’s voices saying “I want to play” or broadly wanting to do their own thing, indicate about ideas on how adult-child and parent-child relationship is constructed and what kind of possibilities are imagined regarding how a child’s life must be lived?

If you have time, please also check these guiding authors, theories & frameworks for my inquiry:

Bronwyn, Davies (2014) Listening to Children: Being and Becoming, Routledge:
New York.
-Communities as ‘’emergent assemblages with multiple entry points, often
opposing lines of force’’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987)
-Emergent, intra-active moments are those that show one’s being open to the
not-yet-known, being open to be affected
-Community as encounters: good and necessary not collapsed into one
another (Badiou 2008)
Ramaekers and Suissa (2011) ‘Parents as ‘educators’: languages of education, pedagogy and ‘parenting’, Ethics and Education, 6,2. 197-212.
-The current trend that situates parents as responsible for ‘’stimulating and
taking responsibility for the intellectual development of their children’’ (Lareau
1989: 172) and therefore framing of parents and parenting in a language that
excludes ‘’the broader sense of what it means to be in a parent-child
relationship’’
-Parents becoming educators who are trying to reach particular learning
outcomes, a process during which the reason why this is done is left behind or
masked, ethical assumptions behind parent-child relationship is unquestioned
Katz, C. (2001) The state goes home: local hyper-vigilance of children and the global retreat of social reproduction, Social Justice, 23,3,47-56.
-Children are invested in with expectations of future outcomes, but the actors
who are responsible for this investment have changed, as the role has been
partitioned to the private sector and the private sphere from the state

See you all tomorrow,

Bengi

In the workshop session, I would like to introduce you my second year research project titled “Exploring Parents’ Perception and Design of Out of School Time”, for which I collected and analyzed data and am in the process of organizing and writing up my findings alongside my literature review. I’m trying to understand how parents’ socio-economic status, neighborhood, housing situation, school choice, race and ethnicity are shaping children’s free time in NYC. I’m analyzing my data (some interviews & demographic information and online documents) by using dynamic narrative inquiry, a methodology that looks at narratives coming from different perspectives, positions and genres in a particular issue of concern as interacting with one another in “social network environments” (Dauite 2014), as all related and talking to one another without literally doing so.

During the workshop time I’m planning to briefly introduce my research and my data but I mainly need your help for my literature review, which I outline in the following paragraphs. It will probably be two sections as such with the content some of which I noted down under. These are the headings that are speaking to my data even though the organization might change a little bit afterwards. I would be very happy if you’d share with me your literature suggestions touching upon these topics I mentioned. I want to write my final paper in the form of this literature review.

–Historical Overview of the Out of School Time in NYC

emerging as an idea of supporting low to middle-income children after children’s participation in labor force dropped and school participation increased, urban change during that time (1880s-1930s…), investment in playgrounds and organized play and after-school programs and then disinvestment in play staff and recess…

the notion of free time of children as “risk and opportunity” (Halpern 2002; 2014)

organized time for well-off – less and less free play (?)

–Parenting ideologies and practices in the context of neoliberalization of education and childhood

safety and security concerns of parents in the city environment

high regulation time and space-wise

ideas about child development : learning over play

individualization of responsibilities as reality (pay for everything, it all depends your social capital etc, parents as partners in school organization, hyperattentive and controlled…) – transferring these to children for upper classes or parenting anxieties – what are we going to do and how are we gonna make sure child is going to be fine..

disinvestment in public services – neighborhood distribution (upper east side, williamsburg vs. flushing….)

no child left behind – assessments and academic pressures

erasure of recess

child as an investment

Thanks all for your help and suggestions,

Bengi