Ladda ner utgåvan. - Fakultet för lärarutbildning - Umeå universitet

In the brave new world
of the other schools. Through our close exposure
to individuals over time, we can think, heuristically
at least, about what effects particular schools
are having both generally and on particular types
of students.
2. Having to theorize ’class’ processes or categories
from students’ subjectivities.
Although a limitation of our study is that
we are working only with what students tell us
in interviews, this might also be seen as a virtue.
Rather than having their ’class’ pre-categorized,
we have to try to understand what their particular
location (economic, family, cultural capital,
etc) actually means to them, and how it is
working for them as they go through school.
(Here, we are of course drawing on and in dialogue
with the existing literature on these issues.)
Students begin secondary school with different
family-based knowledge and resources,
and this was reflected in some of the answers
students gave about what they might do in the
future (be a ’barrister’ as compared with ’get a
job’), or how they spent their time out of school
(’We used to have a computer, but it broke, so I
just go down to my friend’s house and play her
Sega’); and they differ in how articulate they are,
and how self-confident in their interactions with
adults such as teachers and researchers (Yates and
McLeod, 1996; McLeod and Yates, 1997). What
do schools (and different schools) do in interaction
with these differences? In year 7 we were
interested in asking students about how they saw
their school; what they thought it valued; what
they thought of the opportunities it gave them.
The answers certainly begin to undermine any
crude ’school effectiveness’ idea that school
effects are simply an outcome of what the school
does organisationally or pedagogically.
In terms of curriculum, for example, we
found in year 7 that across all four schools the
students tended to be rather bored with the
academic subjects they had done before, and
enthusiastic about new subjects which had a
practical skills component. Of the schools in our
study, the school that had the largest range of
such subjects, and was best equipped here, was
Blacktown Secondary 14 , the school that would
generally be described as the most disadvantaged
of the four in our study. When they were asked
to talk about specific subjects, the students at
this school were notably more enthusiastic than
the students at the other schools, whereas the
students at the private school took no technical
subjects other than one period a week of computer
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Vignettes from
work in progress:
Interactions of class
and schooling:
What school does,
compared with how
it is positioned.