465-212 CDS22P Socialisation and Identity

Students will undertake a study of the individual's construction of a sense of self-focusing on the relationships between social structures such as race, gender, class and sexuality and young children's identity formation. Research-based case studies will be used to explore how contrasting theoretical perspectives, including socialisation theory, explain these relationships. There will be a particular emphasis on the differences between cultural transmission and social construction theories and the influence of modernist and postmodernist understandings of the individual within these theories. This will include tracing the recent shift away from the concepts of socialisation and role to explain identity formation towards the explanatory concepts of discourse, subject positioning and subjectivities. The influence of this shift in research on young children's identity formation in early childhood will be explored.

Essays and assignments totalling 4000 words