Am I Doing It Right? Normative Performativity in the Emergence of Learning as a Leading Activity

Abstract

Learning to read and write is one of the core goals to be achieved within the first years of school , an agenda that has increasingly been pushed down into preschools. However, preschools and schools have different understandings of children’s development and learning , and consequently different educational practices , pedagogical activities and even material conditions. Drawing on Mariane Hedegaard’s elaboration of a wholeness approach to children’s learning and development , this chapter presents a study from Chile of the development of a motive orientation of Samuel during his transition from pre-school to first-year primary. The analysis reveals that while learning was progressively established as a leading activity for Samuel, in this process Samuel and his classmates encountered a series of institutional demands related to grade based academic achievement and control that hindered their possibilities for engaging in literacy learning activities. Under the restricted literacy learning activity setting , children’s engagement was primarily aimed at fulfilling the requirement of the pupil’s position, which has more to do with performing following a set of strict rules and orders, than with developing a motive orientation to learning , such as, exploring and understanding a new system of knowledge communication .