Non Compliance As A Substitute For Voice

Author(s):

Thomas Ralph(presenting / submitting)

Conference:

ECER 2016

Network:

19. Ethnography

Format:

Paper

Session Information

19 SES 02 JS, Geographies of Opportunities, Participation and Mobility

Joint Paper Session NW 14 and NW 19

Time:

2016-08-23

15:15-16:45

Room:

NM-G215

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 question that this paper focusses on is: How do student’s relationships with adults affect their engagement with school? And how do they make their voices heard?

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. To understand the field in which these power relations operate, the paper also incorporates 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.

The work of Adriana Cavarero (2000) is used to highlight an individual’s desire to narrate their lives and Axel Honneth’s notion of recognition (2007, 2012) is used to analyse the nature of relationships between students and their teachers. Building on this, the concept of voice as a process, as defined by Nick Couldry (2010), is used in conjunction with criticisms of formal school voice procedures by Fielding (2004) to understand the failure of school council procedures to address these issues.

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). Through these policies, the purposes of education are assumed as being a priori to the educational experience and, as a result, the voices of children are not listened to.

Method

In order to address these questions the methodology adopted was that of an ethnography. 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 (Pink, 2009). A consideration of emplacement as the relationship between the mind, body and the environment formed the basis for this ethnography and allowed the analysis of the process of place making as it occurring through embodied practices that shaped identities. This in turn in is obviously relevant to the development of non-compliant identities. 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 experience. 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 failure of formal student voice processes were found to further disengage the participants from school, facilitating the belief that school was not run in their interests. Effective voice depends on relationships based on mutual recognition and cannot be based on simple representation. The students in the study understood that teachers had something to offer them, but in order for this to be effective it required them to be heard on all levels. In the absence of their voices being listened to students resist aspects of the education process in order to gain resources to enable themselves to narrate their lives and be heard. The participants grasped that their school life cannot be just as they imagined it. They understand that the experience and knowledge of their teachers is important and useful to them and they wish to benefit from it. However, this knowledge and experience needs to be made relevant to them through the lens of their own knowledge and experience. Ultimately, non-compliance becomes a means by which to exercise voice. By rejecting aspects of education that the participants felt were inappropriate for them and rejecting a compromised individuality that led to a compliant corporate student body they demonstrate their desire to form a sense of self through narrating their own lives. Non-compliance comes about through the desire to gain the material resources required to narrate lives and to do so beyond the restrictions of the self-proclaimed superior rationality of the teachers. This represents a desire for true recognition as individuals capable of decision making.

References

Cavarero, A. (2000). Relating narratives: Storytelling and selfhood. London: Routledge. 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. Fielding, M. (2004). Transformative approaches to student voice: Theoretical underpinnings, recalcitrant realities. British Educational Research Journal. 30(2), 295-311. Honneth, A. (2007). Disrespect: The normative foundations of critical theory. Cambridge: Polity Press. Honneth, A. (2012). The I in We: Studies in the Theory of Recognition. Cambridge: Polity Press. 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

Thomas Ralph (presenting / submitting)

University of Exeter

Exeter

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