This paper focuses on a piece of ethnographic research carried out with young people, teachers and staff of various schools, in a project titled “Education from a Critical Community Psychological Perspective”. As a piece of critical community psychological research, core aims included: exposing taken for granted assumptions; examining inextricable links between knowledge and power; and working with a particular approach to praxis which embraces vital relationships between action, critical reflection and knowledge construction. These epistemologies and methodologies stem from a Foucaultian perspective on knowledge and power and from theory in critical psychology (Foucault, 1979; Hook, 2004; Parker, 2005). The research also aimed for a critical ‘standpoint’ with young people that viewed young people, and furthermore particular young people, as the least listened to and least powerful group within education. This was developed by drawing on ‘Standpoint Theory’ developed in feminist enquiry (Hartsock, 1983). The young people who enabled this research project had all experienced school exclusion, from expulsion to less formal forms, usually for reasons termed by education as ‘emotional and behavioural problems’.

The assumption that adults must be in control of young people in education was found to be particularly pervasive and problematic, stemming from societal ideas of young people, but also perpetuating them. This emerged throughout my research, from practices in mainstream school to ways of speaking available to adults and young people. This paper argues that the assumptions related to the controlling of young people lead to dominant social practices that direct focus away from teaching and learning, in particular more dialogical forms of teaching and learning that this author advocates. The paper examines findings from research carried out with the young people, on the ways of speaking, reflecting and being made available (and often limited) by education, and the windows of opportunity the young people created to resist authority. A particular piece of ethnographic, exploratory, Participatory Action Research which was carried out with a group of four young people (aged around 15 years) is focused on. The paper presents an account of the ways in which the young people resisted dominant and problematic discourses and social practices in education, comparing but also developing some of the work done by Paul Willis (1977) on ‘counter-school culture’