How do emotions contribute to a child’s capacity to engage with educational spaces?

This doctoral thesis documents a longitudinal study of two children in two educational settings, a school nursery, and a reception class in a primary school. The research aim was to answer the question ‘How do emotions contribute to a child’s capacity to engage with educational spaces?’ I am particularly interested in how children’s experiences might influence their learning capacity.
The concerns fuelling my interest related to the implementation of a performance-based pedagogy introduced by the introduction of the National Curriculum in 1988, identified in the Literature review as a contributor to complex concerns around the marginalising of children’s experience of learning.
This thesis begins with the contribution to my thinking made by my personal experience and its influence on my ideas about teaching and learning, suggesting that focusing too heavily on achievement, measured by statutory testing, risks losing sight of the individual child’s experience. It is suggested in the literature that children’s views are underrepresented (Gripton and Vincent, 2021) and that their experience of the educational space can contribute usefully to an informed pedagogy where emotions are valued for their contribution to learning.
In seeking to discover how emotions contribute to children’s experience of the educational space I adopted psychoanalysis as the theoretical framework. A psychoanalytic framework draws attention to complex aspects of the mind, introducing the role of the unconscious and its contribution to children’s emotional experience of their educational space. The Tavistock Observational Model offered me a different way of gathering data, giving me glimpses of a child’s experience of their setting through a shared experience offered by its psychoanalytic approach. Insight into the children’s experience was supported by both my ongoing reflections on the experience and the children’s drawings. The study links psychoanalysis to education historically with early psychoanalysts also being educationists.
The study found that both the theoretical framework and the methodology provide deep insight into the two children’s experience of their educational space and how their emotions influence their engagement. The findings are discussed in relation to the literature and tentative implications for educationalists are discussed along with suggestions for future research.