Wounds and Reinscriptions: Schools,Sexualities and Performative Subjects

Boys in school, homophobia, and forms of masculinity are currently the focus of significant debate in and about education and schools. Much of this discussion takes as given the sexual orientation, and therefore sexual identity, of the students of whom it speaks and mobilizes equal rights discourses on behalf of gay and lesbian students. This paper offers an alternative view of the school level processes at work around these issues. The paper takes up Judith Butler's ongoing engagement with Foucault and her recent rearticulation of Althusser and Bourdieu to analyse data generated through school ethnography in Britain and Australia. This analysis details the processes through which gender and sexual identities are constituted inside schools; illustrates the mutually constitutive relationship between gender and sexuality in contemporary discursive frames; and demonstrates how students resist wounded homosexual identities and constitute legitimate Other selves through their day-to-day practices.     

Human Rights,Identities and Conflict Management: A study of school culture as experienced through classroom relationships

This paper presents the findings of an action research project designed to examine the dynamics of classroom relationships and perceptions of how rights and identities operate in an all boys' comprehensive school in the English West Midlands. The principal aims of the research were to examine the feasibility of adopting a human rights framework as a basis for school life and to evaluate subsequent relationships and identities. The first section of this paper examines the potential of human rights education to promote constructive relationships and manage conflict. It takes the 1989 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child as its framework for action. We then outline the methodology adopted and consider how the classroom environment affects and is affected by those working within it. We reflect on the expression of identities and understandings of rights and responsibilities in the classroom by both students and teachers and the impact of these understandings and of masculine identities on classroom management. Although we recognise the findings of action research are necessarily situation specific and possibly transient and/or changeable, we draw on these findings to develop a model which may be of value to those seeking to develop schools as human rights communities.     

Social Justice Education in a Diverse Classroom: Examining High School Discussions about Race,Power, and Privilege

High school students who participate in social justice education have a greater awareness of inequities that impact their school, community, and society, and learn tools for taking action to address these inequities. Also, a classroom that consist of students with a diverse set of identities creates an ideal circumstance in which a teacher can build upon student differences in order to facilitate meaningful discussions about social justice, especially issues of race. Therefore, in this article we use qualitative case study approaches to examine a high school course on social justice education, paying specific attention to the classroom pedagogy and dialogue on issues of race, power, and privilege. The course was purposefully diverse in enrollment, which brought students together who might not have had interactions with each other prior to the class. We employ Hackman's (2005) five components of social justice education (SJE) as a framework for the analysis of the pedagogy and discussions constructed in the classroom, as well as a common language for what constitutes as social justice education in our research inquiry. Students in the course developed a facility for defining and identifying various forms of oppression and injustice. However, we questioned to what extent these very same issues played out in the class dialogue. Due to the level of student diversity, the course was a unique space to learn about racism and intersecting issues of social justice. However, there was still some student resistance to acknowledging certain aspects of racism. In conclusion, we discuss how social justice education is not absolved from, but rife with complex racial politics.     

Young women's scientific identity formation in an urban context

In this article we examine the scientific identity formation of two young women of color who attend an urban vocational high school. One young woman lives in an urban setting, while the other lives in a suburban setting. We describe how these young women's identities influence and respond to experiences in school science. In particular, we describe how the experience of marginalization can make membership in a school science community impossible or undesirable. We also describe the advantages that accrue to students who fit well with the ideal identities of an urban school. Finally, we describe some of the difficulties students face who aspire to scientific or technological competence yet do not desire to take on aspects of the identities associated with membership in school science communities. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 38: 965–980, 2001     

“… It’s like the immigrants stick together,the stupid ones,and the ones who want to learn something”: dynamics of peer relations,social categories,and dropout in vocational educational training

This paper discusses how student identities are constituted through social categories and how this affects students’ educational trajectories. Dropout is often described as a sudden event but this paper demonstrates how dropping out is a long-term process involving social interactions between the students. It is based on a field study in which the author was enrolled as a student at the car mechanic program at a vocational education and training school. The various social categories emerge in contrast with each other and have fundamental influences in defining the students’ scope of action. Divisions between the students were based on discourses of ethnicity and seriousness. Four portraits of individual students, each belonging to a different peer group, are presented to describe the individual level of the peer-related dropout processes. The discussion calls for awareness of reproducing effects of taken-for-granted logics and discriminatory practices and for including identity-related perspectives on peer relations, when studying dropout.     

A multicultural,gender, and sexually diverse affirming school-based consultation framework

Gender and sexually diverse (GSD) students face unique challenges in schools due to the privileging of cisgender and heterosexist norms in these settings. In particular, GSD youth who belong to ethnically and racially minoritized groups face further challenges within school environments that disregard their cultural contexts and intersectional identities. It is important for school psychologists to ensure safe and high-quality mental health, educational, and behavioral supports for these students. One possible avenue for building these types of supports is through school consultation. When school psychologists collaborate with other professionals in a culturally competent, participatory way, their work has the potential to bolster behavioral, academic, and mental health outcomes at the individual, group, and/or systems levels. Adapting Ingraham's multicultural school consultation model, this article proposes a multicultural, GSD affirming school consultation framework that also approaches the experiences of racially and ethnically minoritized individuals through the lenses of intersectionality and minority stress frameworks. Across its five domains, this adapted framework aims to give practitioners and researchers a conceptual foundation to support GSD students of minoritized ethnic and racial identities by considering interactions among consultants, consultees, and clients within their wider school contexts.     

Pedagogic identities for sale! Segregation and homogenization in Swedish upper secondary school

The aim of this article is to illustrate how Swedish schools construct different pedagogic identities in the way they marketize themselves. We examine through a Bernsteinian lens how upper secondary schools promote themselves; what identities are being called for by the schools and how these identities are expressed. Moreover, the article intends to study how these identities are reflected in studied school actors and how they can be understood in relation to the labour market. We have analysed texts from various kinds of marketing materials, including websites and prospectuses of the schools. The empirical data also include interviews with various school actors. In addition, we attended and recorded observations at open houses and school fairs. Our findings indicate a strong differentiated market-oriented education system, mediated not only through distinctions in courses and programmes, but also through schools creating highly specific niches and targeting specific students as valuable commodities.     

Teachers’ views of professional learning and collaboration in four urban Lebanese primary schools

This study to investigate how teachers develop their skills and knowledge to construct enthusiastic student learning and what part school principals play in that development was carried out in four primary schools serving disadvantaged communities in Beirut. In the absence of rich research in Lebanon on this topic, western literature was used to construct a conceptual framework on professional learning and teachers’ identities; collaborative cultures and learning communities; leadership, power and school cultures. Drawing on a social interactionist epistemology, in each case study school, the views of about 10 teachers and the school principal and some students were collected through semi-structured interviews. The qualitative data were analysed thematically. Emergent findings suggest that collaborative cultures, predicated on helping students to engage enthusiastically with learning, sponsored by assertive school principals led to teachers developing a strong sense of community and positive identities through professional development.     

Desiring machines and nomad spaces: neoliberalism,performativity and becoming in senior secondary drama classrooms

This paper explores Deleuze and Guattari's schizoanalysis in relation to student and teacher becomings and the way these are actualised within the neoliberal and heterosexually striated spaces of the secondary school assemblage. Deleuze and Guattari considered a narrow approach to education problematic and called for creativity as a site of ‘resistance’. Drama is one subject rich with potentiality for students to strengthen their creativity and ‘speak back’ against the neoliberal project. What our research revealed is how the drama classroom is an open, dynamic space where students can embody different identities at a critical time in their adolescent development. What is delimiting about this potentiality is the proclivity of teachers and students, as desiring machines, to conform to the dominant neoliberal culture of competitive performativity. The paper proposes that schizoanalysis offers new insights for mapping complex desire-flows and embodied identities through and against the dominant performative and heterosexist culture.     

Women@Work: Listening to gendered relations of power in teachers' talk about new technologies

This article examines teachers' working identities, focusing on gender inequities among teachers, within the school system, and in society, especially in relation to their competence with and use of computers. It highlights some of the less obvious tensions that are central to the work of teaching in relation to these new technologies, paying explicit attention to the gender inequities that continue to structure our understandings of both teaching as a profession and technology as a cultural artefact. In particular, the article documents how, for the teachers who were studied, perceptions of expertise and experiences of access in relation to new technologies were produced and maintained by the gender inequities evident in computing cultures pervasive in both schools and society more generally.     

Keeping them in line: choreographing classroom spaces

This paper provides teachers with an opportunity for thinking about the kinds of ‘people’ constructed in their classes, the kinds of ‘dances’ choreographed and the ways space is organised for learning. We argue that this is essential for teachers to think about if they are to enact socially just professional practices. In this study, we explore the ways in which students learn to be particular kinds of people. We understand this as happening through their participation in communities of practice. Becoming a member of a community of practice, of a classroom and of a school is a process of developing a particular identity, modes of behaviour and ways of knowing. It is through these ‘normalising’ practices that power is constituted, boundaries constructed and certain ‘kinds of people’ are recognised, represented and constituted, whilst others are not. All individuals are implicated in these processes and active in the construction of their own as well as others’ identities. This paper locates this discussion using social relations of gender and ethnicity, and considers how diversity and difference are actively constituted and play out in one primary school classroom. How students participate in the spatial practices and the construction of pedagogical spaces, what identities are available to them in these spaces and which they take up, is explored. The metaphor of dance is used to analyse these spaces, a metaphor which helps us to understand the complexity of classroom relationships and the way macro‐social practices are both reflected and reconstituted in classroom practices. We argue that the ways teachers think about how they place students, space students and construct students are crucial for student and teacher learning.     

Oral history for student empowerment: capturing students’ inner voices

Through a close analysis of the oral history of Victor, a Hispanic student in an affluent Anglo institution, this paper provides an example of how oral history methods can capture student voices and uncover the silencing that often takes place in well‐intentioned educational institutions, and demonstrates how some of the multiple voices that exist within students and school communities are legitimated, while others are not. Drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of inner voice, the analysis illustrates the potential of oral history methods for probing the multiple voices and lived experience of students. It suggests how these voices help to reveal how students construct their identities in educational institutions.     

Exploring identities to deepen understanding of urban high school students' sexual health decision‐making

Sexual health is a controversial science topic that has received little attention in the field of science education, despite its direct relevance to students' lives and communities. Moreover, research from other fields indicates that a great deal remains to be learned about how to make school learning about sexual health influence the real‐life choices of students. In order to provide a more nuanced understanding of young people's decision‐making, this study examines students' talk about sexual health decision‐making through the lens of identities. Qualitative, ethnographic research methods with twenty 12th grade students attending a New York City public school are used to illustrate how students take on multiple identities in relation to sexual health decision‐making. Further, the study illustrates how these identities are formed by various aspects of students' lives, such as school, family, relationships, and religion, and by societal discourses on topics such as gender, individual responsibility, and morality. The study argues that looking at sexual health decision‐making—and at decision‐making about other controversial science topics—as tied to students' identities provides a useful way for teachers and researchers to grasp the complexity of these decisions, as a step toward creating curriculum that influences them. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 47:742–762, 2010     

Dropping out: Identity conflict in and out of school in Ghana

This paper explores geographies of identity of Ghanaian school dropouts. In particular, we investigate how school dropouts in rural communities construct narratives of identity within and outside school. In our analysis we trace how space, power and identity intersect in accounts of dropping out. Focusing on the narratives of four school ‘dropouts’, we start with their accounts of life outside school where they have significant social responsibilities as parents, carers and/or wage-earners. We contrast this with their accounts of their experiences as students in school. After exploring their efforts to gain and sustain access to school, we turn to their accounts of life in school and the ways they navigate the institutional gender and age regimes. These narratives highlight how being ‘over-age’ intersects with polarised student gender identities in a range of variable ways that discourage staying in school. The analysis indicates that the social positioning and identities of drop outs within school spaces were in tension with those they occupied in their homes and communities. More specifically, we suggest that the difficulties in navigating power and identity in these different spatial geographies are critical to understanding the processes of dropping out. In addition, we reflect on the methodological implications of this research which demonstrates the limits of quantitative data on dropout and associated problems with homogenised, deficit accounts of dropout often articulated in dominant development discourses. In turn this has important implications for how we might construct interventions to address dropout and the right to education for all.     

Forging inclusive practice in ethnically-segregated school systems: lessons from one multiethnic,bilingual education classroom in Sri Lanka

ABSTRACT

This paper offers a perspective on bilingual education (BE) as inclusive education. Ethnolinguistically-separated schools and classrooms in Sri Lanka resulted from an enduring, mother tongue instruction policy which abetted a deeply ethnically-divided nation. More recently, Sri Lanka has experimented with a BE programme in pursuit of enriching the perceived value of the local mother tongues as well as building students’ knowledge of English as a global language. This article presents analysis of the inclusive practice of two Sri Lankan BE teachers in their attempts to advance social cohesion through bilingual education. We demonstrate the logic of practice focussing on four features of the teachers’ work: promoting interethnic relations through regular change of seating arrangements; equal delegation of responsibilities and absence of favouritism; cooperative group work in ethnically heterogeneous groups; and, promoting heteroglossic language practices or translanguaging. The positive, inclusive consequences of these practices are corroborated by focus group data gathered from students in the school. We argue that teachers have a significant role in changing the logic of practice in the classroom, and that the implicit rules teachers encode in their pedagogy can reorient exclusionary, ethnocentric identity positioning towards more inclusive, supraethnic identities.     

Coherence,contradiction, and the development of school science identities

This study demonstrates the potential for collaborative research among participants in local settings to effect positive change in urban settings characterized by diversity. It describes an interpretive case study of a racially, ethnically, and socioeconomically diverse eighth grade science classroom in an urban magnet school in order to explore why some of the students did not achieve at high levels and identify with school science although they were both interested in and knowledgeable about science. The results of this study indicated that structural issues such as the school's selection process, the discourses perpetuated by teachers, administrators, and peers regarding “who belongs” at the school, and negative stereotype threat posed obstacles for students by highlighting rather than mitigating the inequalities in students' educational backgrounds. We explore how a methodology based on the use of cogenerative dialogues provided some guidance to teachers wishing to alter structures in their classrooms to be more conducive to all of their students developing identities associated with school science. Based on the data analysis, we also argue that a perspective on classrooms as communities of practice in which learning is socially situated rather than as forums for competitive displays, and a view of students as valued contributors rather than as recipients of knowledge, could address some of the obstacles. Recommendations include a reduced emphasis on standardized tasks and hierarchies, soliciting unique student contributions, and encouraging learning through peripheral participation, thereby enabling students to earn social capital in the classroom. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 47: 1209–1228, 2010     

The importance of school culture in supporting student mental health in secondary schools. Insights from a qualitative study

Schools have the potential to provide a place of education and sanctuary for children and young people of all backgrounds. The rise in mental health problems in children and young people in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly in relation to growing inequities, means that identifying ways in which schools can help respond to this growing mental health crisis demands urgent attention. This paper reports on case studies carried out in two London comprehensive schools, exploring how aspects of school culture impact (both positively and negatively) on student mental health. Methods comprised in-depth interviews with school staff and parents, focus groups with students and documentary analysis of relevant materials. Fieldwork was conducted during spring 2021 as schools were returning to face-to-face learning following national periods of lockdown. Our study shows how schools might attempt to drive positive mental health outcomes through aspects of school culture and uses a system framework to explore complexities around cause and effect in this area. Key findings include the considerable differences in school mental health provision, challenges in the identification of student mental health needs and the importance of recognising how the mental health of teachers must be considered alongside that of students. Overall, we highlight particular dilemmas of the post-lockdown era that our findings indicate for the education sector, and suggest there may be value in reframing the apparent conflict between ‘attainment gaps’ and personal development, moving towards an educational approach with greater complementarity of these aims.     

Confronting unsuccessful practices: repositioning teacher identities in English education

Teacher education programs attempt to prepare preservice teachers for the various challenges faced in the classroom. One particular challenge new teachers face is how to handle unsuccessful practices. This paper argues that confronting ineffective practices require that teachers respond to complex and dynamic challenges, making change difficult when solutions are not readily available. Presenting data from case-study research, the paper uses an identity framework and positioning theory to explore how two novice teachers navigate moments of unsuccessful practice. Findings suggest that when teachers confronted ineffective practices they repositioned their teacher identities in ways that depended on the ideologies of their school. The paper concludes with implications about the importance of extending typical reflective practices of teacher education with video analysis that challenges students to examine how they enact teacher identities over time within the figured world of their school.     

Same school,separate worlds: A sociocultural study of identity,resistance, and negotiation in a rural,lower track science classroom

This ethnographic study examined how rural, lower track, underrepresented students made sense of their place in school and what role school science played in their cultural reproduction. The objectives of the study were to identify key components of science classroom discourse, analyze means of negotiating these components, and explicate participants' beliefs and roles in defining microcultural identities specific to rural, underrepresented school contexts. Eight students and their teacher participated in this study, which drew heavily upon teacher and student revoicing of common events. Results showed that the quality of science instruction was subverted through a process of negotiation between students and teachers in the context of low expectations and the school culture. Implications for research and practice are discussed. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 38: 574–598, 2001     

‘Let Them Eat Caviar’: Alternative pathways for university students attending to ‘unfinished business’

This paper reports on a study into the educational experiences of a group of students who are accessing tertiary education through alternative entry programmes. There were three purposes for the study. The first was to identify why the students either did not finish school or go to university after school. The second was to explore the students' stated reasons for returning to university later in their lives. The third was to share the students' secondchance experiences in their first semester as university students. The study drew on theoretical ideas surrounding how students who reject school, or who have been rejected by school, may come to view education as unfinished business in their lives. Reconnection with education coincides with wider processes of individuals defining and redefining educational identities.