Living ‘poor’, learning ‘well’: Dewey’s pragmatic transactional approach for rethinking poverty and education

ABSTRACT

Research and Policy on education and poverty tend to assign causality to “external” factors (i.e., family, peers, schooling) which impact young people’s educational outcomes and hence, become the focal point for moderating interventions. We argue that such ideas overlook the social complexity and fluidity of young people’s evolving lives. To better understand and respond to young people’s living and learning through poverty, we present a Deweyan-Pragmatist exploration of the evolving experiencing of a young person living poverty and associated adversity and yet “doing well” through schooling, one that focuses on a transactionally-oriented understanding of the human condition.

Introduction

Being ‘poor’ and ‘doing well’ through school: the case of Imogen

When we meet, Imogen is twelve years old and in her second year of secondary school. She was born in Nigeria, Africa, “but then something was about to happen to me and my sister […] we had to come here.” Imogen does not “want to talk about it” but notes that it is “not safe to go back there.” She is living with her mother, older sister, older brother, and younger brother in a “really small” house. She reports not “knowing who” her father is and notes she has “never met him.” She is sharing a bedroom with her mother and younger brother where rats often run through, and her other two siblings are sharing a second bedroom. The house is in an area that Imogen describes as being a place with lots of young people engaging in gang-related violence and anti-social activity. It is also a forty-minute bus ride from the school, with Imogen noting her inability to attend an extra-curricular school singing concert which she “had been practicing for” during after school hours, “because nobody could come to watch [or] collect” her and “because it’s not safe” to travel into her area “after dark” alone.

Imogen and her siblings are engaging in caring for one another. She mentions that she often “has to help my mother care for my younger brother” noting that her mother spends most of her time at home and is “often sleeping” though Imogen reports “not knowing why.” Further, Imogen reports that her mother “is a Muslim” but that she “is a Christian, because my Mum tells me I’m Christian […] so I’m thinking maybe my dad was Christian.” Imogen attends a Christian church “every other Sunday” with either her older brother or older sister - they are each “taking it in turns to stay home to help my Mum look after my little brother.”

Imogen arrives at school most days considerably earlier than her first class and also collects a “free breakfast” offered by the school every Monday¹. She mentions that her mother is unable to give her money for extra-curricular activities associated with her schooling. Indeed, the costs of her swimming lessons are covered by the school as part of mainstream curricular lessons in physical education. Imogen’s sister is “working two jobs to help with rent” as well as contributing to other household costs. This involves “selling eyelashes and beauty products” and providing an “African catering” service which Imogen sometimes helps with by preparing and packing food. Moreover, Imogen was “given school uniform one day” by the school and received Christmas gifts from the school’s “Christmas Parcel Scheme,” which she believes is “because I was doing really well last year.” When enquiring about these schemes with a member of staff, it becomes apparent that Imogen was given school uniform after a staff member noticed she was wearing ill-fitting clothing and shoes with damaged soles. The staff member also notes that the Christmas gifts were given to Imogen through a collaborative scheme with a local charity to offer presents to young people whose families may be “unable to afford Christmas gifts.” Imogen recalls that one of her gifts was a book that she was “still reading and really enjoying.”

Imogen enjoys learning, is the most engaged during group research activities, and is highly inquisitive during one-to-one research encounters where conversations often evolve through Imogen’s curiosity of various topics (e.g., the “story of Adam and Eve” and human evolution/the reflection of light using mirrors). Imogen enjoys math specifically and this is demonstrated through her desire to continue math as a General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) ‘”even if”it was not a core subject expected by the school. In terms of home learning, Imogen sometimes borrows her sister’s laptop to study, particularly when revising for Math using an online platform, “MathsWatch.” However, she is only able to use the laptop and engage with these online activities (expected by her class-teacher), when her sister is not using it for work, or her brother is not using it for his GCSE studies. When the laptop is not available, Imogen tries to use the online platform from an “old” phone she has. However, it often “glitches,” making the program inaccessible. In terms of in-class learning, Imogen is “doing well” according to teacher feedback and her general record of in-class test marks. She recognizes her achievements in this subject and sees math as necessary for her future. There have however been one or two recent challenges to her Math learning, with a recent “fail” in a Math test remaining completely inexplicable to her. She has stressed and pondered on this, looking for a reason for the “failure,” even reflecting on her mum’s observation that she might not have revised enough for the test. Although she is now back on track, this “out of the blue” difficulty with her math has made her aware that she might be partially constrained in her future learning if the occasion of “failing” one class-test is a reflection of a potential impending trajectory.

Imogen’s story emerges through a number of encounters that we had with her in her school. She was part of an Economic and Social Research Council (the UK’s largest funder of economic, social, behavioral, and human data science) doctoral project. This project focused on academic researchers working with the school collaboratively to explore the nature of the school’s family-oriented intervention programs, which focused on “disadvantaged” and “at risk” students like Imogen, and whether and how these might enable such students to succeed in education. Part of the research design involved exploring (i) the lifeworld of students as these pertained to both school and beyond-school experiencing and (ii) how their educational engagement and attainment was impacted by “factors of disadvantage.” This involved documenting some of the key curriculum and pedagogical challenges that disadvantaged students were experiencing and how these might be understood as pertaining more generally to their lifeworld. Such an understanding was seen as key to ameliorating both the school’s and the teachers’ response to such challenges in order to improve students’ educational engagement and attainments (cf. Jornet & Erstad, 2018).

However, over the course of the research journey, the project evolved to become an articulation of the complexity of how young people live and learn in and out of school, and through poverty and adversity. These were forms of complexity that did not reflect the linearity of arguments that seemed to dominate both research and policy in the field. Such linearity, in the main, tends to suggest that young people’s (educational) agency is causally constrained by structures and cultures of poverty, often codified as external “factors” that pertain to the “place” they live (Ivinson & Ivinson, 2020; Vinopal & Morrissey, 2020). In exceptional cases, where individuals experience or exhibit resilience in the face of adversity and attain various (educational) achievements “against the odds” (Hernandez‐martinez & Williams, 2013), a different ontological take on linearity is assumed in which cause is attributed to young people’s (internal) self-agency. Such agency is often described in terms of young people’s “self-efficacy” (Worrell et al., 2021), possessing and developing a “growth mind-set” (Warren et al., 2019), levels of “cognitive conscientiousness” (O’Connell & Marks, 2022) or an ability to “self-affirm” their educational values and outcomes (Hadden et al., 2020). Efforts to then build such capabilities and self-agentic “resilience” in young people (i.e., through appropriate teacher/school/community “mediators”) become embedded in educational policy (Ball, 2021; HM Government, 2022a, 2022b). For us, neither form of linearity does justice to the contextually-evolving, dynamic, and interconnected ways in which poverty and education manifest in, and through, the living of young people over time.

In this article, we argue for a reorientation in thinking about poverty and education. Our reorientation moves away from arguments focused on causal linearity, which separates the subject (young person) from the object (their environment), and toward a transactional position that recognizes the interconnected unity of subject and object as a more appropriate analytical focus or unit (Jornet & Damşa, 2021). To advance such a rethinking, we unfold a theoretical exploration of the evolving experiencing of Imogen taking a transactionally-oriented ontological and epistemological approach, which attends to the dynamic complexity of living that Imogen’s story suggests. Indeed, Imogen’s story demonstrates many interconnecting moments of her life, each of which become privileged over the temporality of her experiencing that would suggest different “causes” for her educational journeying/outcomes (e.g., math test) at different times, as we will show. Hence, ideas which focus on either “internal” or “external” facets and prioritize these as a restricting (e.g., sibling responsibility) or enabling (e.g., revision) “cause” to her educational experiencing, miss the moving interconnection of these transacting moments with others through evolving environments.

Our critique of such approaches then, is that they tend to rely on an overstated and simplistic linear evidence base that attempts to signal causality regarding the way particular elements of an externalized life impact young people (correlational link) without offering a “how” or “why” theorization of the causal process. Such forms of causal impact then become the focal points for researched interventions/mediators that might moderate such impacts. We argue that such approaches are based on quantitative aggregate correlational evidence that abstracts, rather than deals with, the complexity of young peoples’ living worlds that are deeply social and cultural. In producing such abstractions, they categorically fail to deal with young peoples’ living worlds, in essence making them invisible as subjects. Often, this results in research framing and positioning minoritized and racialized students within deficit models and corresponding oppressions (see Adams, 2022; Gutiérrez et al., 2019).

Given a re-orientation toward a transactional perspective, what are we to make of Imogen’s evolving story and how and why might it allow us to theorize the relationship of education and poverty in different ways? More specifically, what are the theoretical challenges and possibilities of providing an appropriate and evolved (transactional) explanatory set of arguments for Imogen’s evolving educational life and potential future educational success? In addition, to what extent might such re-thinking help both Imogen and the school move forward and provide more general insights to the burgeoning research field of education, poverty, and disadvantage? Finally, can a re-reading of Imogen’s case, taking a transactional approach that recognizes her lifeworld as an ecology of evolving events and occasions both within and beyond school, enable us to draw out essentialist generalizations about the educational agency and associated attainment of “poor” young people?

By essentialist generalizations we mean focusing on the particulars of one case as a way of exploring “the possible” associated with other young people deemed to be educationally and socio-economically disadvantaged (cf. Ercikan & Roth, 2014). Thus, can such generalizations identify the essential evolving work and processes in Imogen’s everyday life that produce the dynamic phenomena of her school learning? And, more generally, can this thinking also enable an understanding of the processes of school learning for others and particularly those whose lives are contextualized by poverty?

We think there is every possibility of developing a set of explanatory essentialist generalizations that articulate processes of schooling and education for “poor” young people where the latter are not reduced to narratives of deficit or of exceptionalism that continue to re-affirm inequity and fail to capture the actual lifeworlds that constitute learners and their contexts of learning. This is increasingly important as such assumptions continue to underpin educational policy and practice which has concrete consequences for the living and learning of real humans, particularly how young people like Imogen understand their general/schooling agency and educational “success.” Hence, we argue that in order to better recognize and make visible the ways young people are living their schooling, as they are simultaneously experiencing poverty and associated adversity, we need to foreground a Deweyan transactional approach to better understand the nuanced dynamic of poverty and education.

Imogen: an occasion of ‘failing’ math

For the purposes of anchoring our discussion on a transactional perspective as an alternative to current mainstream approaches in research on poverty and “disadvantaged” students in education, we focus on a specific instance recorded during our project. Below is an excerpt from a conversation involving one of the researchers and Imogen where Imogen describes this particular “failure” (Figure 1). Noteworthy, the figure² reflects the corresponding nature of speaking and hearing and hence, refrains from inserting punctuation to reflect, as close as possible, the true sense in which the words were spoken and heard during the live occasion. Fundamentally, this recognizes the reciprocity of conversation where spoken words follow on from heard words, without any pre-determined linearity given that, for example, Elizabeth (E) does not know what Imogen (I) will say until she says it and Imogen, similarly, does not necessarily foresee how she will respond until she hears Elizabeth’s spoken word (< I – E >). And so, the conversation becomes an unfolding transaction that changes directions according to what is said and heard, as the evolving figure depicts.

Figure 1. Conversation Excerpt: An occasion of Imogen “failing” math.

Imogen’s inquiring: a conversation between a mainstream dualist ontology and the pragmatism of Dewey

In what ways are we to understand Imogen’s reflections on her failing math test in the context of her evolving, unfolding life that also includes the fact that she is now once again succeeding in math and in her schooling more generally? Might this succeeding moment become one part in the dynamic totality of her living that is open to potential unfolding novelty as she continues to learn and evolve? Perhaps a moment that recognizes the possibilities of both “failure” and “success,” rather than one that presumes any moment to be a pre-sequential element to a presumed ultimate trajectory – in this case either of math’s “failure” or “success”?

What follows is a conversation between (i) what may be considered a mainstream understanding of Imogen’s schooling life that is premised upon a dualist ontology, which privileges the notion of the cognitive individual (Imogen) separated from others (teachers, family, friends, etc.) and from the environment (school, home, neighborhood etc.) with (ii) the transactional approach we advocate for, which views the individual as reciprocally engaged with, and co-constituting, their everyday environments. This arguably more appropriate tool for understanding the complexity of young people’s living and learning aligns with a Deweyan-pragmatist philosophy.

Dualist and separatist ontology - causes of ‘failure,’ being ‘resilient’

Imogen’s narrative about her contextual background and conduct of everyday living, and in her recounting of this particular occasion of math failing, contain all the ingredients to suggest a variety of mainstream explanations for her “failure” and then for her renewed, potentially temporary, success in the subject. At one level, there is the idea exhibited by Imogen’s mother’s arguments, that Imogen might be “not studying enough” which in some ways is an observation that suggests that Imogen is, or should be, in control of this situation. Hence, with appropriate self-action, which in current literature may be referred to as self-regulation or self-determination (see Garrett-Peters et al., 2019; Guay, 2022; Murray et al., 2022; Pratima, 2019) and which may include focusing more on her studies and less on playing with her phone, this situation of “failing” could have been averted.

Alternatively, at a different level of analysis, some of the various elements of Imogen’s living as documented at the outset of this article may also be seen as providing explanations for this “failure”—a failure premised upon a set of “personal” and “interacting” challenges that have culminated in a difficult math encounter. Such explanations are replete in the research literature, including: “evidence” about living in one-parent families as being causal in generating low educational attainment (Nonoyama‐tarumi & Nonoyama-Tarumi, 2017) and generating “life-long disadvantage” (Mikkonen et al., 2016); research documenting the challenges of caring responsibilities that “detract” young people from educational engagement (Choudhury & Williams, 2020³); “evidence” on the challenges that a lived migration poses on young people’s aspirations and attainment (McElvany et al., 2018), or indeed, the role of housing conditions on students’ well-being and capabilities of engaging appropriately with education (Clair, 2019). The combining of such adverse experiences might be viewed as providing a level of environmental “toxicity” that suggests Imogen was always likely at some point to encounter cognitive difficulties, here materializing in her lower math test score.

Despite variations in focus, these ideas seem to share a causal orientation which seeks to explain why Imogen “failed” on this occasion, and perhaps why this may become part of a declining trend for her without the implementation of appropriate interventions. Whilst such suggestions may begin to offer a particular kind of answer regarding Imogen’s “failing,” they are less well placed to understand how, despite such disappointment, she goes on to “do well” in math. The “interacting” challenges of Imogen’s environment, and all that these might suggest for constrained forms of self-action and associated self-regulation and self-determination should, according to much of the literature in this area, result in Imogen “failing” more often and more consistently than she actually does. Such ideas would suggest a set of causal factors pertaining to Imogen’s schooling specifically, and living more generally, which would make her success in math difficult to achieve. And yet the evidence suggests that this is no longer the case and that she continues to succeed in math.

In response to such evidence are a set of contrasting literatures that suggest that perhaps Imogen has become “resilient” to her circumstances. In such a view, the impacting “causal” mediating factors in her life, such as the circumstances of her lived poverty, have been moderated, by perhaps supporting school interventions or by Imogen’s parental admonishing educational structures, which together have improved her resilience (cf. Kiernan et al., 2011; Šimunović et al., 2018). However, such ideas of “resilience” similarly remain premised on linear cause-effect thinking that assumes that one atomized entity (e.g., environment) can and will cause “effect to” another atomized entity (e.g., Imogen), unless moderated by a third atomized entity (e.g., supportive intervention, parental admonishment) that produces a different causal outcome (e.g., educational achievement) (cf. Roth & Jornet, 2019).

Indeed, arguments that relate to Imogen’s “failing” test moment might arise from an interacting ecology of factors that at one level pertain to the spatial elements of her living poverty, and at another level pertain to her own intra “psychological” orientations, which could include her attitude toward education, her aspirations, her willingness to engage or with some other factors that together may suggest forms of resilience. Such an approach may suggest a causal chain or web of factors in Imogen’s living that focus on the interconnecting dimensions of her life.

However, no matter what the explanation or perspective is about, whether it be the self-actioning individual or one that suggests the individual being impacted by adversity, or perhaps one that attempts to combine an ecological of intra and interacting variables, the general underlying ontology about the human condition is the same. That ontology suggests (i) parts of an occasion of living, as evidenced by Imogen, are atomized and disparate, (ii) these atomized parts are then added together creating a “multiplex” challenge, and (iii) these challenges are deemed to be causing occasions such as schooling outcomes thereafter in linear ways, (iv) there being particular interventions that can reverse such causal outcomes by enhancing reflexivity and agency. Imogen’s narrative might be interpreted by any one of these approaches. The focus in such explanations as they pertain to individual young people’s experience of education and poverty, points to the on-going debates about structure and agency and, in particular, how such explanations account for how separate entities such as society, on the one hand, and the individual, on the other hand, impact each other in causal ways.

While there may be value in the above-mentioned approaches, the main problem with such explanations is their inability to resolve how and why one entity does or does not impact the other and through what mediating means. This creates significant problems in the way we think and act toward poverty and education that has concrete material implications for the lives of real people. For example, Imogen’s mother’s way of understanding may implicate how she (i) relates to Imogen and therefore, (ii) how Imogen then understands her general/schooling agency and life conditions (e.g., blame, ability to “succeed”). In other words, such labels and explanations whilst being ill-directed to individual actions may also become the basis for interventions that create further harm in attempts to guide self-agency to overcome adversity and “succeed” in education – attempts which are removed from the complex transactions in which learning and development actually occurs. As Raffo and Roth (2020) note, such debates have continued to plague the field of education and poverty without any clear resolution.

Dewey’s transactional ontology

Rather than seeing life as the result of separate and impacting entities that produce some sort of causal outcome, Dewey recognized the human condition as continuously transitioning and in flux, and took this risky instability as something to be understood and used (Brinkmann, 2011). As such, he preferred to think of “a life in action,” which appreciates the “transactional drama” of person:environment (Hildebrand, 2013, p. 57). This begins inquiry considering person:environment as one whole, a deeply relational, dynamic, co-constituting, interdependent, functional, unit of analysis-one which is fundamentally on human living, or as he called it, experiencing. When attending to experiencing as concrete living, linear causal impact then becomes a “fallacy” (see Dewey, 1922/1930). Thus, whilst there could be a reciprocal relation between preceding and succeeding occasions (i.e., poor attainment and poor attendance), in the sense that the two are co-constituent parts of an entire occasion (life of a person), the relation is not linearly causal or static.

Indeed, in a dualist and atomized approach, Imogen’s “challenges,” even when considered under the umbrella of “adversity,” are treated as “discrete units.” We categorize these challenges as abstractions, and contrast them to the continuous processes of actual experience as an entire unit (Bennett, 1980, p. 226). During such abstraction, scholars tend to “conceptually isolate an antecedent part of a process and label it ‘cause’ in relation to a later part of the process [labeled] ‘effect’ and speak of these two elements as being ‘casually related’” (Bennett, 1980, p. 226). This departure from concrete unfolding experiencing assumes that occasions are statically “fixed” rather than continuously unfolding, which Whitehead called “the fallacy of misplaced concreteness” (cf. Bennett, 1980, p. 231). In Imogen’s case, the continuous dynamism of unfolding occasions is incredibly important in focusing on how Imogen may be “doing well,” then “failing,” then “doing well” again, which demonstrates that there is no linearity to her experiencing. Hence, any causal relation assigned to earlier and later parts of her experiencing would be artificial in terms of how she continued dynamically in the live moments.

Beginning from a position which appreciates the transactional complexity of on-going living, it is possible that prior action can guide future action in the sense that persons can learn from experience. However, this involves learning through the disruption to habitual activity and adaptation/reconfiguration of activities which can become a transformative process from which new habits can potentially emerge. This is how hypothesizing and reconfiguring habits work, particularly in terms of thinking more appropriately about actions through reflexive processes. Thus, we suggest that a transactional perspective offers a more appropriate way of thinking such guided action. The following section will take this transactional approach to exploring Imogen’s occasions of “failing” her test and discuss how Imogen might find rethinking her approach to exploring where she “went wrong.” Rather than “informing future action” based on “truths,” such an approach is about inquiring with the motion of living in order to learn through, and from, experiences.

Habitually reconfiguring, continuously becoming

Imogen attends a school where assessment is part of what it means to “learn” and “succeed” and that constitute the cultural habits of schooling. She attunes to such habits of classroom “learning,” and these are reinforced in the activity of assessment of which she is both a subject and to which she is subjected. This is her habitual activity in the interconnected environment of her classroom that is not solely hers such that,

The person not only acts but also is affected, both directly by events having their source outside the body (e.g., light impinging on the retina) and by its own actions in and on the environment. Experience is the experience of an environment and of acting in the environment.

(Roth, 2020, p. 227).

Foremost, habit cannot begin to be understood without first acknowledging the material environment, that is, without first overcoming the dualism of person and environment as separate “entities.” Dewey (1922) regarded the art of an activity to be dependent upon objects and tools as much as the person’s transacting with these, rendering any notion of “internal mastery” false. The “unexpected” assessment grade then poses a conscious disruption to Imogen’s habitual activity, which raises questions concerning Imogen’s actions and hence, stimulates a process of reflection⁴ for Imogen.

Reflection, though, is not necessarily happening “within” Imogen’s “head” or “mind.” Indeed, it is worth recalling that for Dewey, mind is a verb and should always be approached as such,

what we call “mind” means essentially the working of certain beliefs and desires; and that these in the concrete—in the only sense in which mind may be said to exist—are functions of associated behavior, varying with the structure and operation of social groups.

(Dewey, 1917/1980, p. 59).

In expanding on this idea, Brinkmann (2011) contends,

it is not the existence of something “mental” as such that enables the adult, unlike the child, to perceive the meanings of the world. Instead, it is the developed habitual comportment of the adult that enables her to perceive a rich, meaningful world.

(p. 308)

So, the challenge becomes inquiring the “openness” of “child-like curiosity” with a more evolved depository of “adult-like established social/cultural meanings.” When habitual activity is disrupted then, “observing the world with a consciously reflecting – or theorizing – attitude is something we can (and must) do” (Brinkmann, 2011, p. 308). Such reflection is often “the painful effort of disturbed habits to readjust themselves” (Dewey, 1922/1930).

Imogen has been doing habitual activity which in this case are transactions as part of her math classroom environment. However, as we will come to see, whilst she seems to be realizing that “something went wrong,” she does not yet seem to fully understand her unexpected grade as a habitual disruption which could become a learning experience. This seems to be because her reflective inquiries have not yet come to fruition to enable making sense of the earlier experiencing, in the novel moment (moving from reflective to reflexive). This uncertainty appears to be a natural preceptive to conscious experience emerging whereby, “consciousness is the meaning of events in the course of remaking” (Dewey, 1925, p. 308). As such, “consciousness of meaning is not a passive reception of the world’s structure, but that aspect of the system of meanings where something appears as being subject to change” (Brinkmann, 2011, p. 214). So, it might be said that Imogen becomes consciously aware of her habitual disruption, an experience, which stands out in the irreducible stream of her habitual experiencing as everyday living in her math classroom environment: the moment she sees as “failing” the test. However, she is not yet thinking in non-dualist terms, that is, utilizing transactional/practical-reflexive tools to recognize herself as a transactional body with her environment and others. As such, she is not yet considering goal-directed activity as the starting point for her inquiries and thereby, fully appreciating what a habitual disruption does and can mean. Rather, she appears to be considering herself “not as part of the agencies of execution, but as a separate object” (Dewey, 1916/1966, p. 174).

Moreover, Imogen then begins to “do well again” in the class tests which follow this particular problematic one, as evidenced when she notes her recent test results for the past year since the “failing occasion” have been, as Imogen puts it, “great, really amazing.” Thus, the experience of disrupted habit appears to become a connected, yet novel experience, through a process of reflection which Dewey refers to as a past experience becoming part of a novel experience through disruption which stimulates consciousness (Dewey, 1922). In this way, Imogen’s reflections appear to demonstrate her becoming conscious that her habitual math activity has been disrupted – through this past experience of “failing” – given that it is becoming the theme of her new experience of doing “really amazing” and hence becoming concerned with “where [she] went wrong.” Let this be considered further then.

Imogen’s previous activity in math involves lessons, assessments, and how these are set up in the classroom. Therefore, what she is doing, and the feedback of “success” is a habit of math activity for her. This is then disrupted (occasion of “failing” the test). What appears to be difficult for Imogen is that a new habit of success, with appropriate functional coordination between herself and her environment, is in place (seemingly restored again when she does “great” in following tests), though she is not fully cognitively aware of this yet. Hence, she begins struggling with connecting her previous unexpected grade, which she sees as “failing” with her adapted (novel) ways of doing in her math classroom environment, where she sees herself as doing “great” once more. Her tools for inquiring then appear to become underpinned by thinking in terms of stimulus, idea, and response, which Dewey contended in his work on the “reflex arc,”

the older dualism between sensation and idea is repeated in the current dualism of peripheral and central structures and functions; the older dualism of body and soul finds a distinct echo in the current dualism of stimulus and response.

(Dewey & Dewey, 1896, pp. 357–358).

Given Dewey’s concern with goal-directed activity, he believed that “it is the way we act that determines the character of the stimuli that appear to us. It is not the experience of singular sensory elements that determine our actions” (Brinkmann, 2011, p. 306). Rather, Imogen appears to be working with particular notions of the “mind” as “personal or even private” (Dewey, 1925, p. 8) and as the “self” defined by “internal characteristics” as opposed to habits, whereby “persons are the habit[…] they constitute the self” (Dewey, 1922/1930). This seems most apparent with her concern of understanding “where she went wrong” and her wishing to “go back maybe study more,” which she sees as a potential solution to rectifying her “failing” the test. Put simply, Imogen appears to be laying blame on herself personally/individually for not only “failing” the test but also, for understanding what she could have done to avoid this outcome. Such a “fictional” notion of the self “may lead us to think that we can change ourselves just by changing our inner, psychological constitution […] [when] we can only change the self by modifying our habits, and we can only modify habits by modifying the social conditions that form our habits” (Brinkmann, 2011, p. 310).

Imogen’s method of inquiring premised on individualized/deficit notions of her actions then becomes problematic because of the nature of practical inquiring, which Brinkmann (2011) articulates,

when we think, it is quite rare that an end is clear to us and that we only need to find the most efficient means of reaching the end. It is more often the case that we are confronted with an unclear and problematic situation, which stimulates the development of hypotheses that can be tested in practice.

(p. 309).

This requires “thinking” to be “active, persistent, and careful consideration of any belief or supposed form of knowledge in the light of the grounds that support it, and further conclusions to which it ends” (Dewey, 1910/1991, p. 6), often including “getting clear about the nature of the problem in the first place” (Brinkmann, 2011, p. 309) which Imogen does not yet seem to be reaching.

In such a creative problem-solving approach, which Imogen might find more useful than her current approach, Dewey offers an entire process of reflexive thinking which Brinkmann (2011) explicates in five steps: (a) experienced problem, (b) localizing and defining the problem, (c) suggestion of possible solution, (d) reasoning that develops the wider meaning of the suggestion, and (e) further observation and experiment that leads to acceptance or rejection of the suggested solution (Dewey, 1910/1991, p. 72).

In Imogen’s case, she appears to remain unclear about the problem of the “unexpected” grade because she seems to be testing various actions to confront the problem with individualized notions of deficit rather than coining more deeply relational hypotheses, accounting for her transacted activity with environment and others, which may be more productive for her establishing meaning. If “meaning” is taken to be “primarily a property of behavior, when seen in the context of joint activity with people and objects” (Brinkmann, 2011, p. 312), it seems reasonable to assume that Imogen’s lack of understanding “about where [she] went wrong” arises from her limited starting point which overlooks her as acting-with-environment-and others (transacting) and seeks to locate a “cause” within herself. Taking a transactional approach to inquiring reflexively might provide opportunities for Imogen to expand her thinking and actions pertaining to her experience and hence, may become a learning experience for her.

Discussion: rethinking young people living and learning through transaction

We now turn to drawing this discussion to a close by considering our research questions and thinking about how Imogen’s experiencing is useful for rethinking living and learning in schools through poverty.

The core aim of this paper is to provoke thought about the current ways we theorize and discuss education and poverty in linear, causal-oriented ways, ways that are contextually reproduced and continue to underpin the ways we understand young people’s living and learning in schools. Rather than promoting a draconian overhaul of educational processes and practices, we are advocating instead for a reconfiguration of how we think about (educational) doing with and through others and our environments. Put simply, we hope this paper will stimulate a more open conversation about how we are reproducing particular linear-causal ways of understanding young people experiencing poverty as part of their living that is abstracted and hence divorced from the fluidity of their concrete living and learning. As Imogen’s case illustrates here, it is not just we scholars who become trapped in dualist ways of theorizing; dualist tendencies also characterize learners at large, including Imogen and her mum. This has significant implications for them specifically, and humans generally, in terms of how we understand our agency, assign blame to ourselves/others, and attempt to think/act in linear ways to produce or rectify causal outcomes. Such attempts are contrary to how living “actually” occurs which creates a conflict for (i) our understanding of moments, (ii) our understanding of how such moments relate to other moments and, (iii) our attempted actions to (artificially) produce particular outcomes/moments thereafter – all of which assume singular, rather than contextual/corresponding agency.

Rather, we argue for recognizing the transactional complexity which problematizes ideas of who are the “knowers” and who are the “learners” and appreciates the mutual correspondence with which Imogen, and other young people, are engaging with the world that includes both habitual reproduction and the opportunity for the habitual reconfiguration in moments of dissonance (habitual break). To enable this coda then, we will now consider what Imogen’s math moment and her evolving life more generally might suggest about existing challenges and practical ways forward for the field of education and poverty and, in particular, the research questions documented at the beginning of the paper.

What are the theoretical challenges and possibilities of providing an appropriate and evolved explanatory set of arguments for Imogen’s evolving educational life and potential future educational success?

We have argued that the philosophical baseline that has (mis)informed and produced much overstated “evidence-based” policy/research advice to educational practitioners about education and poverty, analytically separates individual young people from others/their environment. Essentially, our argument is based on Deweyan philosophical ideas that categorically refuse to recognize people as separate from their environment. As we have indicated, the atomized view both we, Dewey, and Pragmatist colleagues advocate against requires the individual to separately develop and orchestrate forms of response adjustment, acquiescence, change to the onslaught of societies external and impacting challenges/ills that become manifest through the mediating role of the family, community, and school contexts. Such arguments sustain a dualism between the self/individual and the other/society that suggest the possibility of producing a linear and causal understanding of the impact between these separate entities. Such an approach therefore advocates that the problems of poverty impacting on young people in particular ways can then be changed by “evidence-based” interventions that have been “demonstrated” to, or that can account for, change or moderation in the impact of poverty. Such intervening approaches tend to be about (i) changing the individual (e.g., to make them more resilient) or (ii) changing the conditions (e.g., to make economic circumstances less pernicious) or perhaps (iii) a combination of both structures and support for individual agency that become ameliorative of adversity posing a threat to educational engagement and success. Fundamentally, such interventions are based on a linearly causal understanding of how individuals relate to their environment. While such interventions based on a linear model may in many cases and circumstances still be relevant, they should be examined carefully with regards to its epistemic and ontological premises and implications.

Imogen’s moment of “failing” a math test as one moment in her on-going living and hence, evolving biography, problematizes such linear thinking. Particular theorizations pertaining to a separation of Imogen’s agentic actions from her evolving context with others attempt to compartmentalize aspects of her living and learning (i.e., math test in school) from other parts (i.e., homework resources, housing conditions etc.) and re-assemble these in linear causal ways to suggest “causes” and determine understandings of how she “does well despite adversity.” Such understandings ignore the fluidity of her living which is co-constituted by her transacting with others through a sequential (though not linear) set of on-going moments through evolving environments (i.e., school, home etc.) that are entirely interconnected. These moving parts, which include Imogen:environment:others in a reciprocal correspondence, choreograph the drama of her everyday life, where she is both doing and undergoing. This unfolding means Imogen is both habitually continuing and yet always susceptible to a habitual break, which creates a moment of dissonance that can become a learning opportunity. Moments such as “failing” a math test need neither (i) determine her future educational trajectory nor (ii) be interpreted as a mere “blip” in an otherwise successful learning journey that she individualistically overcomes through her “resilience” to external adversity. Fundamentally then, there can be no separation between particular moments of Imogen’s living which are all becoming part of her entire life, nor can there be any separation of Imogen from her evolving correspondence with environments and others, where one or multiple aspects may be identified as the reason for her “failure” then continued success.

Imogen’s “doing well” and not so well at different moments in her living demonstrates the fluidity of the learning project-one which emerges through the nuances of her engagements with, and adaptations through, evolving contexts with others. The importance of recognizing this transactional fluidity is the first necessary step to rethinking education and poverty in more practical ways.

To what extent might such evolved thinking help both Imogen and the school move forward and also provide more general insights to the burgeoning research field of education, poverty, and disadvantage?

By recognizing the transactional ways living and learning unfolds, we have suggested that Imogen may find a creative problem-solving approach – such as that which is reflexive of entire occasions as moments in her full life – more useful when attempting to answer the question of “what went wrong?” through her “failing” math moment (habitual disruption). Hence, we are not arguing that stasis/particular habits cannot be reproduced more generally (i.e., if Imogen had continued to perform poorly in future tests), but that those moments of dissonance can become useful through reflexive inquiry which recognizes (i) living as transactionally complex and (ii) learning as reciprocally co-constituted.

In the case of Imogen this might be about her beginning to ask questions of the transactions she is engaged with in her schooling – such as the peers in her classroom, the resources she has access to, the shifting context and emphasis of class tests associated with the school’s more general assessment practices, as well as her on-going choices such as studying or playing on her phone, both of which are intimately interconnected. This would mean not paying attention to any one of these moments in isolation (i.e., playing on her phone as her Mother suggests may be causing her test “failure”) but, seeing the totality of her activities. Taking such an approach may mean that if she is to experience another habitual disruption, such as another undesirable test result, she may become more attentive to particular forms of correspondences and hence respond in more adaptive ways than her previous intentions to identify causes and rectify previous actions. This then becomes a process of responding attentively to our complex transactional ways of living rather than intentionally focusing on apparent “causes” that are, in essence, abstractions of our unfolding life. For schools and teachers, this is also about moving away from singular or composite linear causal explanations for why and how students experiencing poverty may struggle to engage with education. In practice, departing from the roll call of adverse experience both within and beyond school that at the outset pre-determine a constrained agency and that need to be combatted by a more forceful set of protective factors (e.g., the building of growth minds-sets and enhanced self-efficacy and/or improved and educationally engaged parenting practice).

Such forms of reflexivity can also aid schooling practitioners to embrace a more deeply holistic transactional understanding of, and engagement with, young people, and themselves, recognizing all the while that evolving biographies for teachers and young people are reciprocally corresponding to co-constituted moments of life. Such an approach requires abandoning the idea of the teacher as “knower” and the student as the “learner” and appreciating that both transactors are reciprocally “learning” and “teaching” through their on-going engagement where both are responsible and neither are entirely in control. This might lead to an appreciation of, and focus on, the adaptive (fallible) practices that practitioners and students alike engage with daily, moderating the notions of a linear pedagogy and the idea of individual merit. Indeed, as Lipman (1976) advocated some fifty years ago, and which remains relevant today, this may suggest a focus on encouraging problem-solving processes where young people are encouraged to “think about thinking” where the focus is less on “teaching” and more on enabling environments and engagements that are more conducive to co-constituted learning. Put simply, this may encourage young people and teachers to ask “why” and “how” (i.e., transactional moments) more than “what” (i.e., specific cause) and equally important, be prepared for open engagement to respond to such questions which may be more conducive to a collaborative problem-solving process where all involved (i.e., student, peers, teacher) learn from and with one another. This would then appreciate “defining a problem” and “devising a solution” as moments in a whole evental process where various methods could be utilied, enabling space for potentially novel ideas and allowing for better recognizing otherwise minoritized or marginalized learners as historical actors (Gutiérrez et al., 2019). As Lipman reminds us “there is no known method for producing new ideas” (Lipman, 1976, p. 20) – if there was then all ideas would be known, and the educational project more generally would be redundant. In general terms, this moves the goal posts of thinking about education and poverty in deficit and static ways to instead examining the possibilities based on a mutual transactional correspondence.

Our focus, therefore, must be on enabling inquiry that may lead to novel ways of thinking and doing, particularly if we are to continue attending to evolving social problems which demand creativity. To do so, would mean to develop more fallible habits for radical social transformation, which are open to on-going adaptation (cf., Zembylas & Zembylas, 2021). The development-practical approaches to this way of thinking could then be explored using transactional methods for understanding learning (cf. Östman & Öhman, 2023) and utilized to experiment and develop novel ways to encourage learning that aligns with the evolving complexity of daily life.

Can Imogen, as an example of an ecology of evolving relational events and occasions both within and beyond school and specific to one individual, enable us to draw out essentialist generalizations about the educational agency and associated attainment of young people made poor?

In terms of the claims of this research being essentially-generalizable, the narrative of Imogen and our Deweyan inspired thinking tools provide a way of making sense of how some “poor” young people may “do well” educationally through the potential for a reconfiguration of possibilities that habitual breaks present. And yet, an approach that focuses on the transactional habits of individuals can also suggest ways of understanding those individuals who do not “do well.” For example, aggregate low levels of attainment for young people made poor can be understood through the process of socially/culturally reproducing habits, spatiotemporally. Put simply, whilst habitual reconfiguration makes “adverse” experiences a possible opportunity for learning, it does not mean that all such experiences will be occasions of learning. Indeed, given the environmental and relational contexts of disadvantage there may be every possibility of a broken detrimental habit being reconfigured into another detrimental habit. What this means is that the formation of habits and hence, the possibility of habitual breaks becoming occasions of learning, is co-constituted (and thereby, relationally determined) through transactions with others through changing environments. Thus, focusing on transactional habits – in this case the moments of one young person – provides a deeper, concrete, understanding of those who forge patterns of “not doing well” educationally (habitual reproduction) as much as for those who present anomalies to these trends and “do well” through the habitual reconfiguration/novelty which becomes developmental. The “essentials” of such generalizable claims then are that inquiring into transactional habits is a way of understanding how both (i) patterns of human practices (i.e., low attainment) and (ii) anomalies to general trends of such practices (i.e., high-achieving “poor” young people) are possible, recognizing all the while that such patterns should not be used as abstractions for the purposes of thinking about how education and poverty interconnect in the living and lived lives of young people.

Understanding, and attending to, young people experiencing poverty and adversity whilst learning through schooling, must begin with more appropriate theorizations of human conduct that recognize the complexity of evolving, adaptable, daily living, and which do not reproduce deficit/linear models that contribute to reproduction of inequality (e.g., Guay, 2022; Hernandez‐martinez & Williams, 2013; HM Government, 2022a; Warren et al., 2019). Only then, will we be able to rethink poverty and education in more fruitful ways.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. This is in addition to the school meals Imogen receives as part of the governmental Free School Meals scheme.

2. “I” represents Imogen, “E” represents Elizabeth (Researcher). The first letter identifies the speaker, whilst the second identifies the listener. E.g., <I-E> highlighted text represents Imogen speaking to Elizabeth, who is hearing and thereafter, responding to Imogen where you see <E-I> (unhighlighted text).

3. See also, the extensive work of Saul Becker and Colleagues, e.g., Evans and Becker (2009); Dearden and Becker (2003).

4. In terms of the difference between being reflective and reflexive, reflection emerges as the explication and integration of those practical and theoretical commitments implicitly present in the range of everyday practices and vocabularies when those commitments are tested and questioned in light of one another and the evidence available. Moreover, insofar as reflexivity involves rectifying one’s commitments, it enables change in one’s practice and further intellectual development, opening onto new modes of expression (Young, 2014, pp. 50–51).