There has been an inclination to understand school buildings as neutral, a container for practice rather than a constituent part of socio-spatial relations. The material environment of schooling has not been routinely problematised despite this being well established practice in areas outside of education (O’Donaghue, 2006). It is contended here that school architecture cannot simply be seen as a vessel within which education takes place.

Uptis (2004) suggests that for approaching two centuries schools in the west have been built according to the factory model of education, whereby homogenous groups of pupils are moved between confined spaces, filled with knowledge and then tested. Educational space itself composes a tacit form of teaching, emphasising specific cadences of movement in time. This visible but obscure aspect of the curriculum is a significant force that provides form to the everyday activities taking place in school. In turn, facilitating the creation of a specific and unique culture contributing to the manner in which individuals occupy and move through those spaces (Prosser, 2007). The material space of a school, being more than just a context, silently contributes to the production of subjectivities and identities (O’Donaghue, 2006).

This paper considers how movement within school was used as an expression of independence by a group of disaffected students. It also examines how the punitive restrictions placed on that movement were unnecessarily harsh. It draws upon the work of Foucault (1988; 2003) to understand power as diffuse rather than a simple dichotomy between power and resistance, combining this with the ideas outlined above to show that movement within school in therapeutic in its own right as well as a key means by which pupils can resist power structures in school.

The ethnographic research reported in this paper took place in a secondary school in the South of England that had been identified as an ‘underperforming’ school by Ofsted (Office for Standards in Education) inspectors.  The school is located on a deprived estate, taking its students 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 was in the process of being rebuilt at the time of the study. The school has been viewed as failing by the broader community, containing a large number of students perceived to be disruptive and disaffected.

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.

In order to focus on how pupils move through school, 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. The focus on the creation of place and the ways in which place was experienced required methods that neither prioritised the visual nor were reducible to it (Pink, 2009). Whilst more traditional approaches to participant observation and interviewing attend to cultural and social systems, values, organisation and more, they can be restricted by their lack of responsiveness to experiential facets of ethnography. In order to address these issues, a variety of methods were chosen in order to collect data and maximise the engagement of these methods with the creation of place. Observations, interviews and walks with the participants were carried out. Walking with students was considered to be a key means of observation. Movement is fundamental 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 also invited to create photographic representations of places and spaces around their school, proposing possible meanings connected to the resulting images and these were used as a starting-point from which feelings about the institution could be explored. 20 participants were involved from Years 10-11, aged between 14-16. The participants were all perceived as low achievers in the school and 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.

The restrictions placed on the movement of the pupils were frustrating for the participants, not due to some ulterior motive but because it was required for its own sake. Movement was both an assertion of independence and provided a sense of aimlessness in contrast with the persistent pressure to achieve. By grasping opportunities to move through school according to their own agenda the participants were demonstrating a degree of control over space and their sensory engagement with their environment, establishing their ownership of the space to themselves and broader school authorities. The punitive confinement that was occasionally imposed upon the participants was considered excessively harsh and totally unreasonable, removing any opportunities to engage with their wider environment. The building work that was being carried out in the school at the time of the study disrupted the participants use of space and movement. This was both negative in the sense of the removal of their usual environment and positive in the sense of opening up fresh spaces to move through in new and different ways. What much of the participants’ behaviour showed is that they were not simply transgressing boundaries through their movement through space, rather that they were pursuing movement as a therapy for its own sake.

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