Resistant agency in German lessons in primary education in Germany

ABSTRACT

This paper aims to research practices of resistance as an important part of agency in primary school classrooms. By combining a post-structural theoretical frame with a critical ethnographic research approach, it understands children’s resistance as an ordinary practice, as a necessary response to structures and practices of the classroom setting. It argues that agency needs to be resistant to some extent, because otherwise it would be merely submission or adaptation. How agency can emerge depends on the social position of the student, which influences the way in which she or he is able to anticipate (more or less implicitly) spaces for resistant agency and also how he or she is addressed in the classroom and beyond. An ethnographic case study of German lessons in a third-grade primary class in a German school shows how resistant agency manifests and how it might be restricted when it comes to racialised subject-positions in the classroom.

KEYWORDS:

• Resistance
• children’s agency
• primary education
• German lessons
• ethnography
• racialisation

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the reviewers, who helped a lot to clarify and improve the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Anke Wischmann http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9011-5626

Notes

1 For the normative expectations on children as good pupils – regarding helping each other out in the classroom – see Huf and Raggl (2016).

Additional information

Funding

This research has been funded by the Leuphana University of Lueneburg, Germany.