“You Heard Me Swear but You Never Heard Me!” negotiating Agency in the pupil referral unit classroom

ABSTRACT

This study explores the exercise of student agency in an alternative educational setting in England by considering students’ verbal interactions during an art lesson in which they created masks and during an engineering lesson in which they developed model rockets. We build on pre-existing operationalisations of student agency by drawing attention to some of the more particular linguistic features that characterise the exercise of agency in immediate classroom situations. Our findings demonstrate that the participating students were responding to, renegotiating, or resisting their teacher’s agendas in subtle ways, depending on the contingencies of the moment.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Much preexisting research highlights PRU students’ negative experiences of mainstream education with poor student–teacher relations featuring prominently within the literature (e.g., Hamill & Boyd, 2002; Hart, 2013; Munn & Lloyd, 2005; Pillay, Dunbar-Krige, & Mostert, 2013). In addition, students frequently arrive at PRUs mid-term, are likely to be experiencing difficulties with their academic work (Yell, Meadows, Drasgow, & Shriner, 2009), and have absence rates higher than the mainstream population (Taylor, 2012). Furthermore, students from low-income families are overrepresented in PRUS (DfE, 2017).

2. Davies (1990) traced the interest in agency in the classroom back to the open schooling and deschooling movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Others go much further back in time to consider the philosophical foundations of the notion. For example, Matusov, von Duyke, and Kayumova (2015) considered the role of human agency in Kant’s universal rationalism.

3. The National Curriculum was introduced into England, Wales, and Northern Ireland in 1988 to standardise programmes of study and attainment targets for state primary and secondary schools.

4. The school has a Teacher-to-TA ratio of 1:1 compared to a 2:1 national average (Ross, 2014).

5. Key Stage 3 is the legal term for the 3 years of schooling in maintained schools in England and Wales, normally known as Year 7, Year 8, and Year 9, when pupils are between 11 and 14 years of age.

6. See Jordan (2012) for a discussion of the technical challenges and issues in relation to participant anxiety and privacy, which can emerge when making video recordings in sensitive environments.

7. We use the term “affiliative” here to distinguish our analytical category from Edwards and D’Arcy’s “relational agency.” Although the notion of affiliative agency comes close to relational agency, as both are forged via social bonds and collaborative interactions, it is important to note that relational agency involves a more specific capacity to recognize and use the support of others when engaging in purposeful action.

8. Thick description refers to the detailed account of field experiences in which the researcher makes explicit the patterns of cultural and social relationships and puts them in context (Holloway, 1997).

9. “Our” is a colloquial term used in the North of England to denote a family member.

10. Theoretical perspectives on third space are founded on concepts of in-between spaces (Bhabha, 1994) that provide a zone for new interpretations of meaning. Fundamental to these perspectives are understandings of third space as socially produced through discursive and social interactions, which allow for alternative sense-making practices that draw on personal experience (see Bhabha, 1994; Gutiérrez, Baquedano-López, & Tejeda, 1999).

11. Speech-act theory is a subfield of pragmatics concerned with the ways in which words can be used not only to present information, but also to carry out actions.