The Happiest Days?

Front matter

The Happiest Days?

Schooldays are the happiest days, The happiest days of your life

(Old song)

Introduction

Chapter 1 Establishing Order in the Classroom Chapter 2 Organizing and Responding to Difference Chapter 3 Gender Cultures

Chapter 4 Pupils and ‘Race’

Chapter 5 Pupil Interests and Strategies

Chapter 6 Pupils at Work

Chapter 7 Laughing at School

| References Author Index Subject Index

125 157 191

224 239 244

Acknowledgments

The material in this book has benefited from discussions I have had with many colleagues over the years. I would particularly like to thank, for comments they have made on parts of this work at some time or other, and for general influence on the development of the ideas within it, Andrew Pollard, Colin Lacey, David Hargreaves, Andy Hargreaves, Martyn Hammersley, Lynda Measor, Martyn Denscombe, Rosemary Deem, Ali Rattansi, Brian Davies and Stephen Ball. As a teacher, I found that pupils, while they might get me down occasionally, could always be relied upon to pick me up again. This was especially noticeable after a bad day. Equally, as a researcher I have found them a great source of inspiration. It is difficult to pick any out for particular mention, but perhaps an exception might be made for Caroline, James and Rebecca, three excellent key informants. Special thanks go to Kath for expert advice, research input and general support; and to Sheila Gilks for defying all my attempts to mystify her with much-corrected, labyrinthine drafts. Earlier versions of parts of chapters 1-3, and chapter 5 were published in Sociology and the School (1983) Routledge and Kegan Paul; part of chapter 4 was previously published in ‘Pupil Perspectives and Cultures’, unit 12 of Course E208, Exploring Educational Issues, The Open University; chapter 6 combines two papers, previously published as ‘Relating to Schoolwork’, Educational Review, Vol. 30, No. 2, 1978, and ‘Negotiating the Demands of Schoolwork’, Journal of Curriculum Studies, Vol. 10, No. 4, 1978; chapter 7 combines and updates papers previously published as ‘What’s Red and Screams?’ New Society, March, 1983; ‘Coping at School through Humour’, British Journal of Sociology of Education, Vol, 4. No. 2, 1983; and ‘Having a Laugh’, chapter 5 of The Divided School (1979), Routledge and Kegan Paul. My thanks to the editors and publishers for permission to reproduce this material here. ` vi

Introduction

Schools are happy places. A visitor to a school might witness the joie de vivre of youthful high spirits, the merry camaraderie of the staffroom, the affectionate banter in teacher-pupil relationships, laughter ringing along corridors and around playgrounds, the sheer fun of pupils associating together. Many pupils, whatever they have achieved, claim to have had a ‘good time’ at school, and say they will miss the teachers. Some cry on departure, so sorry are they to leave.

Schools are also miserable places. The same visitor selecting another route or day through the same school might witness bitter inter-pupil rivalry, incredible staffroom pettiness, teacher-pupil confrontation, the heavy pall of boredom, teachers under stress. The literature abounds with portraits of schools as grim places from Dickens, Lawrence, Maugham, Spender and others to the ‘deschoolers’ (see, for example, Lister, 1974). Pupils have likened school to ‘prison’, ‘concentration camp’, ‘a battleground’. They experience demands and pressures that they perceive as running counter to their interests. Leaving school is like escaping from constrained and hostile surroundings into the free and real world, and beginning life in earnest.

Schools, thus, are places of struggle, where teachers and pupils do their best to cope with the problems set up where social constraint collides with personal intention. The results of this struggle can lead to happiness or misery, or a combination of the two. For some pupils the struggle is the essence, calling for undivided attention and all their abilities, and success in it can be profoundly satisfying. Other pupils engage in less extreme ‘coping strategies’, requiring skill and creativity no less, but which are more accommodatory, less confrontational. They are coping with school demands, teachers, their fellowpupils, work, new knowledge, transitions between educational stages, their own developing self, and the assaults of others on it and attempts to change or

Vil

The Happiest Days?

fashion it. In this activity they draw on their own considerable resources, both collectively from background, and school-generated cultures, and individually, exercising personal choices differentially according to interests.

Schools are also places of learning. Pupils do, at times, acquire skills and knowledge in line with official intentions. Much depends on the opportunities that are given teachers to teach, and to pupils to learn. This ‘opportunities to teach and learn’ model has been expounded in Woods (1990a), which also deals with the first, teaching, part of the model. This present book is addressed to the learning aspects. Opportunities to learn are not just about conducive circumstances, like a reasonable teacher-pupil ratio, decent buildings and accommodation, adequate resources, and supportive school ethos, though those are important. They also include good teaching (see chapter 1 for how this is defined) and good relationships (see chapter 6). Essential to this is a degree of cultural attunement to pupils by teachers and effective ‘matching’ along a range of dimensions and in various areas. This includes cognitive and curriculum matching, as discussed by Bennett et al. (1984). This involves, for example, setting pupils appropriate tasks for their abilities. Such opportunities | also include a range of social factors which do not stand apart from cognitive factors, but influence the way pupils think, how they behave, how they are motivated, how they assign value, how they perceive themselves. Though a teacher and a class within a classroom constitute one teaching situation, there are, in effect, a number of teaching-learning situations, since each pupil, or groups of pupils within the class may subscribe to different cultural influences. The more obvious ones are those based on social class, gender and ‘race’. Pupils come to the classroom via different avenues and equipped with different ways of seeing, thinking and talking, and with different degrees and varieties of ‘cultural capital’ (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1977). Some groups can constitute ‘cultural islands’ if sharply differentiated from other groups and from the teacher. If the teacher subscribes to a dominant culture, regarding all other kinds as inferior, defective, and in need of reform; and/or if the school differentiates systematically among its pupils by, for example, streaming, banding or setting (chapter 2) so that some groups are consistently disadvantaged, pupils from alternative cultures may be forced into struggle or coping or ‘resistance’. Some pupil careers consist almost entirely of developing and refining such modes of adaptation. If, however, the teacher joins the pupils and looks at the world from their different positions and perspectives, the same cultural resources that are employed in strategic defence can be used for viii

Introduction learning. This may involve a certain amount of bargaining.

Schools are, therefore, also trading-places. This is not just for cigarette cards or marbles, though that may be important in the pupils’ social world. Trading is central to the main activities of school, to the establishment of the eground-rules which are to govern classroom interactions (see chapter 1) and work-rates (see chapter 6). These are most assiduously, though largely implicitly, constructed, and jealously defended. Breaking such agreements is a recipe for trouble. Each school, and teacher within it, has to negotiate their own mode of procedure. Some pupils will also trade one lesson, or one teacher, against another in order to pursue a rational line of interest that is not met by a more uniform line (see chapter 5). Trading assists coping, therefore, and obviates conflict and confrontation. It may help to establish a consensus.

These are the various themes developed in the book. Throughout there is an emphasis on reality as a social production, contrasted with views of attitudes and behaviour guided by deficit models; on the individual’s construction of meanings on a rational basis, as opposed to pathological interpretations; on the emergent and negotiated character of interaction; and on how understandings are based on symbols such as language, words, looks, gestures, appearance, mood, laughter. I draw on a range of ethnographic work to illustrate these points. One of the great strengths of such approaches is their power to evoke the realities of situations from the perspectives of the participants. Further to that, however, the accumulation of such work in recent years reveals a number of theoretical lines and strategies. One of these is where a number of studies can be brought together to illuminate different aspects of a particular process or perspective, and thus suggest a general pattern. This is the case with ‘initial encounters’ and ‘the ideal teacher’, discussed in chapter 1. Certain findings have been replicated here; others have differed, and prompted a modification of the notions, a process that will no doubt continue.

Another line is where a theory has been suggested by one research study in a form that more pointedly makes it available for testing in later studies. The best example of this is ‘differentiation-polarization theory’, which states that academic differentiation by the school will lead to a polarization of sub-cultures among the pupils, between those championing pro-school and those anti-school values. A number of studies have followed up Hargreaves’ (1967) and Lacey’s (1970) initial formulation, and from them can be gained a developing sense of how this process works and under what conditions. Some have suggested alternative theories to account for Hargreaves’ and Lacey’s findings iX

The Happiest Days?

based on social structures and relations external to the school. But it is difficult to dispute certain aspects of the ethnographic work. This particular theoretical line and the relationship among these theories are discussed in chapter 2.

Also illustrated by the ethnographic method is the variegated nature of social life, with all its inconsistencies and contradictions, its multiplicity of roles, and layers of reality. It will be seen that it would be a mistake to formulate a theory pertaining to the whole based on research of only a part, though this is not uncommon. As knowledge of areas is built up, however, the degree of inter-relatedness of theories: that have been suggested becomes more evident. This is considered in chapter 2, and in subsequent chapters.

Undoubtedly one of the main strengths of ethnography is in its power of cultural portrayal. Its present run of popularity in Britain began with those studies of the late 1960s and early 1970s of predominantly male youth. The chief motif running through these, apart from maleness, was social class (chapter 2). There were some graphic descriptions of these groups ‘from the inside’ which cast new light on their behaviour and what lay behind it. However, though these showed the usual detailed and faithful representation of the main subjects of study, others more peripheral, such as other students, teachers and girls, tended to be seen as stereotypical ciphers. The exclusiveness of what has been described as ‘boys’ own ethnography’ was soon challenged, and studies of girls in their own right and differentiation by gender restored the balance (chapter 3). These showed how socialization, school processes and organization, the curriculum, teacher-pupil and pupil-pupil interaction and teenage culture all contributed to unequal chances between girls and boys at school. They revealed, too, the stereotypical nature of the passive, pliable, victim, female image, and showed girls as active, innovative, and constructive, in their own right, albeit often in different ways from boys. These studies do not simply add on to the end of the ‘boys’ own’ researches, but require consideration of how gender relates to social class.

The same is true of ‘race’, equally largely left out of account in the earlier studies, but now gaining in popularity (chapter 4). Despite Britain being a multicultural society, many of Britain’s schools, including multi-ethnic ones, are run on a monocultural basis. They offer a largely anglocentric curriculum. Pupils from most minority ethnic groups appear disadvantaged in the ‘differentiation-polarization’ process. They come into conflict with those teachers who operate a deficit model of cultures other than their own. Racism may pervade their relationships with white pupils as well as teachers. In the face of x

Introduction this, they develop and practise their own forms of resistance focused on celebrating the most prominent elements of their cultures, and fortifying their own identities within them. Here is the classic ‘battleground’ with opposing forces. However, not all schools are like this by any means. The study of nonracist, genuinely multicultural schools, enables comparative work to be done across the board in the continuous quest to find the conditions that promote the best education for all children. Again, a number of ethnographic studies, as well as providing rich description of their own particular subjects, can be brought together to fuel theory in a more general area. Similarly, all these studies are useful in considering the interconnections among social class, gender and ‘race’. Some of the indications arising from these studies are examined in chapters 2-4.

If ethnography is strong on cultural portrayal, it runs an almost inevitable risk of painting a picture of individual subjection and of cultural determinism. But it contains its own antidote to this, for it is concerned also with individual interests, perspectives and volition. Chapter 5, therefore, shows some individual variations on a number of themes. It does not invalidate the themes, but shows how individuals weave a path through and among them, now borrowing, now contributing to them. There is a looser, more dialectical relationship between individual and culture in many instances. Such a view requires a more self-directed, strategical model of pupil development to place beside the more heavily externally directed models as in ‘sex-role socialization’, and such a one is also outlined in chapter 5.

The evocation of realities, theoretical advance, cultural portrayal, individual interests and strategies are, then, all aspects of the material presented here. There is one other, represented in chapters 6 and 7, which is to do with the unpacking and delineation of particular areas of activity, in this case ‘work’ and ‘laughter’. Nobody would dispute that these are both prominent activities in school, in the sense that they constitute sets of behaviours that can be described in those terms, and they serve as focal points for the direction of other sets of behaviours. Most schools ring to the injunctions of teachers to pupils to work, and to occasional, and sometimes frequent, peals of laughter. But what are pupil perceptions of ‘work’? How is it constituted in their minds? Given that most pupils say they want to work at school (chapter 2), what are their understandings of what is involved? Chapter 6 presents two prominent aspects of this as revealed in one study that lay emphasis on the nature of teacher-pupil relationships, and varieties of ‘negotiation’ between teacher and pupil.

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‘Laughter’ as a theme runs throughout the book, from the ‘sussing-out’ activities of King and his henchmen (Beynon, 1985) in chapter 1, the ‘havin’ a laff’ of Willis’ (1977) lads in chapter 2, the ‘resistance laughter’ of Dubberley’s (1988b) girls and McLaren’s (1986) pupils, the intense association and ‘running jokes’ of Furlong’s (1984) group of Afro-Caribbean boys in chapter 4, the creativity of excitement and their own life spaces by Lynn Davies’ (1984) ‘wenches’. Chapter 7 attempts to bring together from a number of sources and disciplines a range of work on pupil humour and laughter, and to indicate its main functions. Some of these are consensual in situations of high matching in the cultural areas discussed earlier, some are conflictual where clash and confrontation occur. Thus the ‘peals of laughter’ that one might hear resounding in classrooms and corridors might be being used as an aid to pupil development, a celebration of companionship, a teaching aid, a cultural defence, a test of teachers, an offensive weapon, a social balm or a social disintegrator. Given all these uses, and its high degree of effectiveness in all cases, it is not surprising that this contributes strongly towards the impression that ‘schooldays are the happiest days’. For many pupils, however, this is little more than replacing the underlying reality with the antidote.

Some of the material presented here has appeared in various other publications, now largely out of print. I have taken the opportunity to update and expand this work while integrating it around the common theme of how pupils cope with school.

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Chapter 1

Our social behaviour is regulated by rules. Some of these are explicit. The grammar school that I attended as a pupil, for example, had a printed list of rules, rather like the Ten Commandments in tone. The last one of these I still remember as ‘a breach of good manners is a breach of a school rule’. I remember it largely, I suspect, because it was not until the third year that I understood what ‘breach’ meant. I was perplexed, too, by another rule. This stated that if a pupil cut his finger while performing some woodworking task, then he would receive a ‘signature’ in his ‘prep book’. Signatures (the initials of the person awarding them — a member of staff or a prefect) were marks for bad conduct. If you collected three in a week, you lost a ‘merit’ holiday (a free half-day); if you were unfortunate enough to assemble two lots of three, you were caned by the Headmaster. On one occasion I cut my finger rather badly while making creative use of the chisel in fashioning a dove-tailed joint out of a knotty piece of wood. I was hoisted on to the work-bench by the teacher, the finger was displayed to the rest of the class, and a double signature ceremoniously entered into my prep book. As luck would have it, this completed a set of three to add to another set already completed for various ‘breaches’. I was duly caned as the law prescribed.

While, looking back, we might appreciate both the humour and the reasoning involved, neither were too apparent to me as a pupil at the time. I was as mystified as I had been by my mother’s anger on one occasion when I was pulled out of the river half-drowned. Had she wanted me fully drowned, I wondered? The school’s was an authoritarian regime. Rules were to be obeyed, not necessarily understood or agreed upon. Yet the length of the queue outside the headmaster’s door at daily punishment time (waiting here

The Happiest Days?

was the worst part of the process for you could hear the stinging thwacks of the cane being administered to the bottoms of those ahead of you!) carries a suggestion that the system was not too successful. It operated by repression rather than consent, and, arguably, served to promote rather than remedy disorder. I certainly went on cutting my fingers with painful regularity until the woodwork teacher in despair transferred me to ancient history. This lack of efficacy, as well as the spread of egalitarian ideas, is possibly one of the reasons behind the growth of more cooperative regimes based on negotiation or bargaining in some form, either explicit or implicit. Pupils have considerable resources in this two-way process. They have collective strength (and parents!), and many varieties of recalcitrance, from rough-and-ready to finely-tuned. Above all, teachers are requiring something from pupils, and they are trying to change them in a way that might be perceived by pupils as an assault on the self (Geer, 1977). They invariably have to bargain to achieve these ends, for pupils are not passive, mouldable objects.

Consider, for example, classroom interaction. Teachers might try to establish rules on such matters as how pupils enter the room, where and how they sit, how they interact with each other and with the teacher, how and when to ask and answer questions, how to write in their books, work rates, appearance and so on. However, even if rules are laid out on tablets of stone, as those of my grammar school, they are not necessarily enforceable as such, nor may they be the best means to the desired ends. In most cases, in fact, rules seem to be negotiated. Thus a teacher might begin by introducing a rule ‘no talking in the classroom’. This might be found impossible to enforce without sacrificing some other, more essential part of the teacher’s programme (such as reasonably good relations with the pupils); or it might be found to run contrary to other valued aims (such as the production of work). The rule might become modified, therefore, in the light of experience to something like, ‘I don’t mind your making a noise in the classroom as long as it’s a working noise’, which leaves some flexibility to the interpretation. What actually constitutes a ‘working noise’ may not be a matter simply for the teacher to decide. It may be the product of a series of negotiations over a period of time which reflects the climate teacher and pupils have constructed between them. In this scenario, when pupils exceed a ‘working noise’ they are perceived as going back on the bargain, just as the teacher would be if the ‘working noise’ were disallowed. In both instances sanctions would follow. In this respect, pupils have considerable power — they can make life very uncomfortable for teachers, and on occasions bring about their downfall (Sikes et al., 1985; Riseborough, 1985).

This is not to say that teachers do not play a strong part in the exchange. There is plenty of testimony to the skill of teachers in ‘grooving’ pupils in to classroom rules (Smith and Geoffrey, 1968), in promoting procedural activity conducive to a ‘good working atmosphere’ (Edwards and Furlong, 1978), in requiring cultural and communicative competence (Hammersley, 1977; Edwards and Westgate, 1987), in orchestrating the varied aspects of the teacher role so as to bring about a seamless web of teaching and control (Morrison and McIntyre, 1969), in establishing ‘the ground-rules of educational discourse’ (Edwards and Mercer, 1987). But, equally, pupils can, on occasions, have considerable influence, and this has increased as more authoritarian styles of teaching have receded. It is the pupils’ part in negotiating rules that I wish to consider here — how they do it, what strategies and sanctions are brought to bear, what interests lie behind their actions, and what kind of teacher elicits the best educational response. I shall begin by looking at how pupils behave in new situations.

Initial Encounters

From the very first moment of starting school, children are active participants in the construction of classroom order. Davies (1983), for example, has challenged the notion that children are, in the first instance of initial encounters, passive. She quotes from a classroom observed by Wax (1971) in which no cooperation existed. It felt as if she (Wax) ‘had been thrust into some scene from Alice in Wonderland. Never in my most anxiety-ridden professional nightmares had I imagined that a schoolroom could be like this one’ (Wax, 1971: 253). In such circumstances, the basic importance of the pupils’ willingness to talk and cooperate is emphasized in stark relief, as is the power of the students. Davies made a detailed study of videotapes she had made of several classrooms on the first day of school. Though her first interest had been in how teachers constructed order, she became increasingly aware, as she repeatedly viewed the tapes, of the work the children did in assisting the teacher. She illustrates the social competencies they displayed in the first few minutes without which the established order would not have emerged. They worked individually and in small groups before class began, and moved collect-

The Happiest Days?

ively when school was about to commence, all on their own initiative. Their collective response to the teacher’s greeting confirmed the appropriateness of his approach. They listened, raised their hands, asked questions, providing the teacher ‘with opportunities to display the kind of teacher he is and the kind of classroom this is to be’ (p.66). They discovered the nature of pupil competence, grasped a number of meaningful rules, and established an orderliness that all recognized. They showed an underlying considerable interactive competence that did not have to be taught. |

However, the product of such interaction might not be ‘learning’ so much as ‘coping’ with the problems presented to pupils within the situation. Thus, a common pupil ploy observed has been that of ‘pleasing the teacher’. Respect or liking for the adult, a desire to keep out of trouble, or simply getting tasks done as quickly and easily as possible can be the motivating factor. We noticed a young child of four years of age just starting school was more preoccupied with studying his fellows’ responses than in listening to the teacher (Grugeon and Woods, 1990). Infants of 6-7 years old have been observed searching for clues to the right answers to teacher questions in teacher behaviour, and faking attitudes to appear to ‘know’ (Tuckwell, 1982). The chances are small, for example, that one will be picked out of a ‘forest of hands’ volunteering an answer, and if perchance selected, one can always have ‘genuine’ doubts. In any event, it is better to have been seen as being involved, and to have tried, than to sit unresponsive. Holt (1969) has given a range of examples of such behaviour, including ‘guess-and-look’ (studying the teacher’s face for clues as to the nearness of one’s guess), getting other people to do the work for you (asking, copying, trading), extracting clues or concessions from the teacher, winning acceptance of answers by subterfuge (for example, whispering so that the teacher might accept it if it sounds correct, perhaps clarifying in the process so that the teacher in fact answers his/her own question). Hargreaves (1972) gives examples of ‘spotting the question’ when the teacher is going round the class in a predictable sequence; duping the teacher by appearances and ‘impressive language’; and of pupils who would write the date in pencil on their mathematics exercise books, so if the work was not marked, it could serve for work on another day. I was told in one school of pupils who re-used sibling’s models in CSE examinations. Such strategies combine ‘work-avoidance’ with ‘getting it right’.

However, such accommodating strategies assume an initial establishment of order in the classroom. This often has to be fought or bargained for. When pupils meet a teacher for the first time there are a number of unknowns (on both sides). Pupils do not know how strict or ‘soft’ the teacher will be, what behaviours and appearances will be permitted, how hard they will be made to work, and so on. Some regimens might attempt to establish rule by domination, and prescribe these things explicitly. In other situations they might emerge more inductively through a kind of bargaining.

Geer (1977, 7) describes a typical process:

By listening carefully to what a teacher says he (sic) wants in class and

comparing among themselves what grades or comments he gives for what kinds of work, and ‘by trying things on’ (mass shoelace tying, for instance) in the early days of a school term, a class may reach a consensus about its teacher’s standards, both academic and disciplinary. It then transforms what the teacher says and does into rules for him to follow. He must not change these rules the class makes for him, and he must apply them to all pupils.

The emphasis varies, of course, from classroom to classroom, but in all such instances the agreement is implicit, and the teacher’s behaviour is constrained, whether this is realized or not. Pupils can bring sanctions to bear, like sabotaging the arrangements for a visitor to the school. Teachers can use rewards, like allowing more time for a test. Geer argues that the basis of the teacher’s authority for the pupil is the academic matter and the site of it is the classroom. Outside these areas, in corridors and yards, and in social and moral affairs, teacher control has less legitimacy. It is often in these areas that teacher-pupil conflict arises, as few teachers would accept the logic of these distinctions, considering that they teach the ‘whole child’, and that what happens in one arena affects another.

Bargaining can often be enjoyable for both teacher and pupils. It can be part of the joys of sociation, and, for the teacher, calls for considerable management skills, which recognize, for example, when and when not to give way. The establishment of a consensus which promises to yield near maximum education advantage given the conditions is a considerable achievement for all. However, the path to such a consensus is sometimes a difficult one. This would appear to be the case in the study reported by Beynon (1985). He observed a class in all their lessons during their first half-term at a boys’ comprehensive school in South Wales. Among these boys was a core group who were the main instigators of ‘mucking’ and ’sussing’. Sussing ‘revealed

The Happiest Days?

how individual teachers reacted to provocation and stress and whether they could uphold and put into practice (in acceptable, to the boys, ways) the claims they were making for themselves of being strict, ‘‘no nonsense’’ teachers, who were both interesting, worth listening to, and expert’ (1984: 121). It was not a matter, therefore, of teachers unilaterally laying down rules by fiat, and of pupils following them, with perhaps some slight deviance. Rather, ‘at this stage, pupils demand empirical evidence of each (teacher’s) managerial expertise and a clear definition and demonstration of the parameters of the control s/he seeks to establish’ (Beynon, 1985: 37).

Beynon identified six major groups of ‘sussing strategies’ among these boys:

(a) Group formation and communication. This was the essential basis of the challenge to the teacher, for there is strength in numbers and a common purpose. The group had ‘a unity about it and an internal dynamism’. It was dominated by one boy — King — who initiated most of the challenges. They drew attention to themselves, created and exploited diversions and recruited others on occasions from elsewhere in the form and from outside.