Cultures of Resistance

Author(s):

Tom Ralph(presenting / submitting)

Conference:

ECER 2015

Network:

19. Ethnography

Format:

Paper

Session Information

19 SES 09,

Paper Session

Time:

2015-09-10

11:00-12:30

Room:

316.Oktatóterem [C]

Chair:

Sofia Marques da Silva

Contribution

This paper is the result of research that took place in an underperforming school in the south of England. The school is located on a deprived estate and takes its pupils from an area in the bottom quintile with regard to deprivation indicators and regularly features at the bottom of local league tables. Recently converted to academy status (an academy in the UK is a state funded school which is independent from local authority control) the school is in the process of being rebuilt. The school in question is seen as abject by the broader community and features a large number of disruptive and disaffected students.

The overarching research questions that this paper focusses on are: What kind of person do resistant pupils want to be recognised as and what kind of place do they want school to be? Within this the paper examines how students develop an identity of non-participation and how they act in order to affect the nature of the place they are in.

In order to investigate these questions the paper draws on the work of Foucault (1979, 1982, 2003) who suggested that in order to understand how power relations work it is necessary to investigate resistance rather than trying to understand power from the perspective of its own rationality. This approach is useful since students in school do not resist specific institutions or groups, but specific instances of power personified by those that they come into immediate contact with on a day to day basis. It also mobilises concepts of space and place developed by Doreen Massey (2005) and Tim Ingold (2008) whereby space is a product of interrelations permanently under construction as opposed to simply a surface and place becomes a product of these intersections within the wider power geometry of space. This is particularly relevant to the context of a failing school, seen as abject by the surrounding community and struggling to maintain any improvement. The concept of voice as defined by Nick Couldry (2010) and the student’s belief that they lack control over their lives in school is also key in terms of understanding the motivations for their resistance.

Although the research took place in a specific British school, it remains relevant to a wider European audience due to the expansion of Neo-liberal education policies across Europe through strategies such as the Lisbon Agenda (Turner & Yolcu, 2014) and the entrenching of disadvantage in schools similar to the one in question.

Method

In order to address these questions the methodology adopted was that of a sensory ethnography (Pink, 2009). This was considered appropriate due to the focus on place in the research questions and an emphasis on the experiential and evocative elements of an ethnography was deemed apposite in order to address these. Considering emplacement as the relationship between the mind, body and the environment forms the basis for a sensory ethnography and allows us to analyse the process of place making as it occurring through embodied practices that mould identities. This in turn in is obviously relevant to the social identity approach and the development of resistant identities of non-participation. Within this methodology, the methods used were observations, interviews and photographic methods. Whilst observation and interviewing are usually associated with ‘classical’ ethnography they can be rethought to fit in with a sensory ethnography. The researcher must learn to recognise their own emplacement in other people’s worlds; a similar approach to auto ethnography but seeking routes through which to develop empathetic experiences of the world of others. Participants were asked to take photos that showed what it was like to be at school, these could then both be analysed in their own right and be used as the basis of later interviews. The use of photos to recreate experience in an interview setting can counter the transitory nature of aesthetic and sensory experience. In order to examine how students responded emotionally to the geography of their school environment, they were asked to draw ‘emotional maps’. The participants drew maps of the school from memory and used colours to highlight particular relationships between places in school and their emotions. These were then linked to observations of their movements around the school. Walking with students was also considered to be a key means of observation. Movement is key in the creation of place (Lee & Ingold, 2006) and the routes, rhythm and pace of walks around the school allowed the researcher to participate in the students place making activities. Participants were selected through purposive sampling, identifying a small handful of key informants and snowballing from these to include their friends. In order to ensure there were a range of voices included in the project, key informants were identified from a variety of streams within the school.

Expected Outcomes

The paper finds that, whilst the patterns of resistant behaviour that students employ tend to be spontaneous, they frequently are not acting as individuals but rather as groups which act to defend their identity from the threats posed to it by formal education. Specifically, in reaction to being forced into occupying certain subject positions, the students use their own power to ensure that the teachers themselves are similarly forced to occupy particular subject positions. This process, in part, perpetuates the conflict between the groups. The fact that the school is gradually being demolished and rebuilt is also seen as a threat rather than an opportunity. The paper identifies that the school underestimated the impact that the rebuild would have on the children and that it cannot be seen as a neutral process which is dealt with simply by reallocating classrooms. Also, the lip service paid to student voice by the school is a key issue in causing students resistant behaviour. The students in the study find that their agency is denied by the school and this, coupled with their desire to be seen as adults with legitimate opinions about their schooling, results in their resistant behaviour.

References

Couldry, N. (2010). Why Voice Matters. London: SAGE. Foucault, M. (1979). Discipline and Punish. London: Penguin. Foucault, M. (1982). The subject and power. Critical Inquiry. 8(4), 777-795. Foucault, M. (2003). Society Must be Defended. London: Penguin. Ingold, T. (2008). Binding against boundaries: Entanglements of life in an open world. Environment and Planning A. 40, 1796-1810. Lee, J. & Ingold, T. (2006). Fieldwork on foot: Perceiving, routing, socializing, in Coleman, S. & Collins, P. (Eds) Locating the Field: Space, Place and Context in Anthropology. Oxford: Berg. Massey, D. (2005). For Space. London: SAGE. Pink, S. (2009). Doing Sensory Ethnography. London: SAGE. Turner, D. A. & Yolcu, H. (2014). Neo-liberal Educational Reforms: A Critical Analysis. London: Routledge.

Author Information

Tom Ralph (presenting / submitting)

University of Exeter

Graduate School of Education

Exeter

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