A Good Enough School
Report n:o 164 A GOOD ENOUGH SCHOOL A study of life at school, and school’s role in life
Final report from the project “Students as Partners in Research”
National Agency for Education
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Order adress: Liber Distribution Publication Services S-162 89 Stockholm Sweden Tel +46(0)8-690 95 76 Fax +46(0)8-690 95 50 E-mail: [email protected]
Order number: 00:524
Dnr: 1995:1502
ISSN 1102-2421 ISRN SKOLV-R- -164- -SE
Published by Skolverket (National Agency for Education) Sweden 2000 Printed by db grafiska, Örebro
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Swedish National Agency for EducationForeword
This report brings together the findings from an evaluation study based on three years of correspondence between the Swedish National Agency for Education and forty-six students from different schools around Sweden. The study had a twofold objective: to contribute to methodological development; and to capture the way students view school. The study began in 1995 and continued until 1998. The first section of the report presents an account of how the idea to base a study on an exchange of letters arose, and describes the initial phase of the project. We look at the concept of “students as partners in research”, and consider various aspects of the role of writing in the reflective process. There is also a description of the practical organisation of the correspondence. The following section gives a brief account of the methodology adopted in processing and analysing the students’ letters. There is a short review of the three interim reports which were published while the study was in progress, and a description of the phenomenographical analysis of the textual material. In the next section we present the overall analysis of the whole of the letter-based material, and describe how we widened our methodological perspective to an angle which can perhaps most accurately be termed “cultural analysis”. The analytical work leading to the final overall findings and conclusions, which has followed a course leading from the general to the particular and back to the general, is described in such a way that the reader can follow the analytical process. The second part of the report presents the research results gained from the analysis, in two sections which take a qualitative look at the project’s findings. The report concludes with a discussion of the findings and the methodological approach adopted. This book addresses itself to teachers, school managers and others who work in the field of school education. It may also be of interest in the area of teacher training, and other training and education contexts relating to children and young people. It is our hope that the report will arouse the reader’s interest, invite a critical examination of its findings, and represent a contribution to wider discussion of life at school and the place occupied by school in young peoples’ lives. A “Research Report”, which looks at the “Students as Partners in Research” project in greater academic detail and provides a more scientific examination of the methodological considerations relating to the study, is available on order from the National Agency for Education (in Swedish only). We wish to extend a warm “Thank you” to the forty-six school students whose commitment and readiness to approach the task seriously and openly made this report possible.
Stockholm, March 1999 Christian Lundahl Oscar Öquist Ulf P. Lundgren Oscar Öquist Director of Education Director General Project Leaders Head of Department of Evaluation
Christian Lundahl Director of Education
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Contents
Part One Students as Partners in Research 7 To Write is to Think 13 The Letter as a Genre 15 Our Themes 16 The Correspondence 18 526 Letters 20 Processing and Analysing the Letters 21 Powerlessness – Strangeness – Helps and Hindrances 21 From the General to the Particular 23 … and Back to the General 24 Part Two Findings 27 The “School World” 28 The Hall of Mirrors 28 “I’m a white nigga” Dressed for Success Soap Opera: “Life at School” Rites of Passage at School A Question of Ethics and Aesthetics Fragmentation 41 Non-Coherence of Time and Place Nurds and Troublemakers Too big for this Town The Multicultural Park Lighting 50 Präzens Light and Shade “A Good Enough Teacher” Drug Trade 59 Highs and Lows Decimal Fetichism Trial by Ordeal
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The Strategists 69 The Art of Surviving a Day at School Sussing out the System Evasive Action Surrogate Strategies Individual Sovereignty
Part Three A Good Enough School 84 Overall Reflections on the Study 94 Bibliography 97
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PART 1 Students as Partners in Research
When we wish to find out what students’ attitudes towards school are, the usual approach is to carry out different kinds of questionnaire-based studies. In 1992, when the National Agency for Education carried out a national evaluation of school education at the compulsory level (i.e. for pupils aged from seven to sixteen) in an investigation called the “NU 92” project1 , the objective was to achieve a more multifaceted and nuanced picture of the work of the country’s schools. To this aim a series of different questionnaire-based studies were carried out; what all these studies had in common was that they took as their point of departure the definitions which the national curriculum and schools themselves give of what the work of schools is and should be. The project met with a good deal of criticism; one source of criticism was the Department of Education at the University of Uppsala and the research team led by Professor Sverker Lindblad. Lindblad, and others, put forward the objection that the project was lacking any clear student perspective regarding the work done by schools: “One consequence of this (the fact that the project had as its basis the definitions of the work of schools embodied in the national curriculum) is that no attention has been paid to the wide-ranging and varied activity which takes place in school even though it is not embraced by the official descriptions of school life contained in the national curriculum; activity which nonetheless has an important part to play in school students’ development – for example everything that goes on in the school yard and in the corridors, inter-student interaction in the classroom, etc. Another consequence is that the students included in the study were asked to respond to ready-constructed tasks similar to those ordinarily set by teachers, and were not given the opportunity to use their own definitions and premises to illuminate what they themselves see as the central experiences of their life at school.” (From Praxis No. 1, 1995, p 12). When researchers such as Lindblad talk of the importance of the student perspective on school, they are claiming that research on the work of schools needs to be supplemented so that it also includes the following:
1 See Truedsson, L. Vad händer i skolan. Resultat från den nationella utvärderingen av grundskolan våren 1992. (“What goes on at School. Findings from the national evaluation of comprehensive school, spring 1992”). National Agency for Education, 1993.
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1) students’ own experiences and thoughts concerning what goes on at school; 2) what happens in the classroom or elsewhere at school above and beyond or parallel to what appears or is expected to take place; 3) the ways in which different categories of sudents think or function at school (op.cit. p 16, our italics).
A precondition in this respect, according to Lindblad, is that use be made of a more varied and sensitive methodological arsenal than has traditionally been deployed in national evaluations. Other researchers have also pointed to the absence of the student’s view from research on education. In a wide-ranging review of the field of research relating to students’ experiences of school, Eriksson and Schultz draw this conclusion: “Student experience of curriculum has not received much attention recently from educators neither in conceptual work, nor in empirical research, nor in the conventional wisdom and discourse of practice does the subjective experience of students as they are engaged in learning figure in any way /.../ If the student is visible at all in a research study he is usually viewed from the perspective of adult educators’ interests and ways of seeing.” (1992, p 467 in Handbook of Research on Curriculum). Taking as a starting point the insufficient level of knowledge existing with regard to what children and young people genuinely experience in their everyday lives at school, we began to weigh up possible methods which would enable us, in a relatively simple fashion2 , to gain insights into what life at school is really like. Our aim was to find a method which in an open, honest and unprejudiced way could capture the knowledge which it is only reasonable to assume that students must have of a place where they spend almost 15 000 hours. In the process of sifting through the literature on methodology we came across an English study of life at a boarding school, presented in two publications (Lambert et al. 1968, 1970). One of the aims of this study was to investigate how being a boarder affects children. Among the methods adopted the researchers made use of diaries and letters, extracts from which provided the basis for the book The Hothouse Society. The book accords a prominent role to the students’ letters and diaries, and as a result the text has a very vital quality and throws open the door to the world of the boarding school. Although the researchers asked the students to write diaires without giving any specific directives as to topics, the students nevertheless covered most of the events and phenomena occurring in English boarding schools. The diaries provided Lambert with a textual record of a parallel system existing alongside school’s official rules and functions; Lambert calls this system “the pupil society”, a culture of which the school’s staff have no knowledge, a
2 Compared with video recordings, observations made in the classroom, etc.
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culture with its own values, norms and systems of punishment, even having its own language. Although Lambert does not draw many explicit conclusions, the study is of interest because of its ‘close-up’ perspective and its desire to let school students speak with their own voices. Throughout it is obvious how much the students appreciated being given the chance to express themselves; in their letters and diaries they even warned Lambert that the truth, seen through students’ eyes, about school and boarding life might be more than he was able to take! What Lambert’s study shows is that letters and diaries can provide a good deal of knowledge and insight concerning life at school which other methods are less well fitted to pick up. He opens up a sphere beyond the world known to adults, and points up how necessary it is to supplement traditional research perspectives with the student’s view. Having carefully analysed Lambert’s study we decided to try something in the same vein. We soon discovered that studies of texts written by students are an unusually rare occurrence in the field of research on school education – but that they are not as infrequent in related fields, such as child psychiatry. Inga Sylvander has made use of a method whereby children have been asked to write essays on different topics. The idea for this approach was originally put forward by Maj Ödman, who is a psychologist and Montessori teacher. In one of their joint books (Sylvander and Ödman, 1985), Sylvander and Ödman brought together essays and drawings, followed them up with interviews, and compared the fear felt by children (aged 9 – 12) in 1984 with material from 19633 . Their book is of interest from the methodological point of view since it shows that it is possible to get even very young individuals to produce open and detailed textual material. Although in contrast to Lambert’s study the children were not asked to write diaries, it is nevertheless clear that many of them have written about themselves in their essays. It is also interesting to note that the authors decided to analyse in depth certain texts which are very individual in character – they did not limit their attentions to the most representative essays. This can be seen as underlining the separate identity of the individual – which the authors say is important in reaching understanding of children in general. A similar book is that written by Charles Westin (1979). It is based on material he was given by Sylvander and Ödman, but in contrast to the above- mentioned study this book deals with the disappointments experienced by children between the ages of 10 and 15 years. Westin’s analyses are in every respect more far-reaching than Sylvander and Ödman’s work. What primarily makes Westin’s book interesting is his attempt to compare the essays with each other and to draw conclusions from this comparison. The children included in his study fall into four categories: year 4 at school (i.e. approximate average age 10 years), year 6 (12 years), and year 8 (14 years). Westin begins his study by
3 The authors’ conclusions were, among other things, that in 1984 children generally felt a higher level of fear with regard to war, features from TV and video violence, and the splitting up of families.
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analysing essays by students in year 8 – the arguments propounded for this being that these students are closer to him as an adult, and that he felt he could expect in year 8 mention adult figures in their essays more frequently than their male counterparts. The most frequent occurrence is that both parents are mentioned; the next most frequent is that only the mother is mentioned; and least frequently they mention their father without making any mention of their mother. Westin also effected qualitative analyses of the texts – for example he found that the descriptions students gave of their parents followed a certain gender-related pattern: Mum is the person you come home to, Dad is the one who gives you money. By comparing the essays written by different age groups Westin saw that certain experiences and situations were common to children of all ages. For example bullying, social rejection, and disappointment at low marks and poor performances in tests were depicted in similar ways across all three age categories covered by the study. Equally, Westin noted differences in the way school was portrayed: in the younger age groups the essays contained more positive comments on school and the work done there, while the descriptions written by students from year 8 contained a great deal of ennui and disenchantment. By means of his comparisons of the three age categories Westin attempted to capture and pinpoint aspects of the socialisation process. Although he could only gain snap-shots from the three age categories he draws the conclusion that the direction taken by socialisation is clearly discernible: it moves from disorder not only to order, but rather to a state of organisation. Socialisation is achieved by, among other things, coming to terms with disappointments. The studies carried out by Sylvander, Ödman and Westin show that it is possible to gain a good “inside picture” of the thoughts and conditions of life of children and young people by studying their texts. The studies also demonstrate that it is possible on the basis of a relatively small number of individuals to identify patterns which hold true for children and young people in general. Further, clear differences emerge between girls and boys and between children of different ages with regard to the ways in which they write about their reality. Inspired by these studies4 we elected to carry out an explorative study conducted in the form of written correspondence between students at lower and middle secondary-level school and the National Agency for Education. This approach, we saw, would ensure that the investigation was relatively free from preconceptions in its endeavour to record a true picture of school as experienced by school students. What Lambert and the Swedish researchers mentioned had in common was that they limited their analysis to empirical data collected on one single occasion, whereas a study conceived with a longitudinal structure, we assumed, would have additional qualities to recommend it. We believed that an exchange of letters over a period of time would have three major advantages compared to gathering letters or diaries on only one single occasion: firstly, a 4 For a more detailed description of the background to our study see the Research Report mentioned in the foreword.
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longitudinal-type of study is less sensitive to being impinged on by external events, or short-lived moods or opinions on the part of the respondent; secondly, the reliability of the data can be assumed to increase since, over time, a relationship can be built up between the researcher and the respondent which is characterised by a sense of security and mutual confidence; and thirdly, it is possible to follow the respondents’ linguistic development. We decided that the project would run over three years, from the autumn term 1995 until the end of the spring term, 1998 (the school year in Sweden consists of two twenty-week terms: the autumn term, from mid-August to mid-December, and the spring term, from early January to early June). Towards the end of the summer in 1995 we contacted three school princip- als in three different municipalities (in Sweden it is the municipal authorities which are responsible for school administration); we contacted them by phone and via an information letter. The principals were asked to canvass the support of a teacher, preferably the form tutor of the class in question, who in his/her turn was asked to introduce the project to the students. The information letter we sent to the principals detailed a number of criteria which we thought were reasonable in the aim of ensuring that our sample population was as well suited to the needs of our study as possible: we judged it to be important for the study to include roughly the same number of boys as girls, with the children coming from varying age-groups and having different cultural and social backgrounds. In addition, we wished the students chosen to have shown an interest in writing, although they did not necessarily have to have unusually good language skills. In our information letter we also emphasised that the individual students and their schools would remain anonymous. Finally a written agreement was drawn up concerning participation in the project, where the principle of protection of anonymity was laid down in black and white. After three rounds of letters we found that the material we had received was so substantial and interesting that we decided to increase the size of our sample of schools and students. From the spring term of 1996 onwards seven schools, representing municipalities in differing geographical locations and reflecting differing sociocultural strata, were included in the study; the sample included two schools from suburban locations – one suburb with a high proportion of immigrants in the population, and one with a high average level of education among residents; two medium-large cities; one municipality of an industrial character; and one municipality in a sparsely populated rural area. The study also included one independent school from an urban area (note that in Sweden, an independent school is not a fee-paying private school; the term is used to denote schools providing alternative methods of education to those used in state schools – such as Steiner schools, Montessori schools, schools set up by parents from a particular religious denomination, etc.). The school students are distributed among three categories: one group started writing letters when they were in year 5 and continued until year 7; the
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next category started writing in year 7 and continued until year 9; and the oldest group started corresponding in year 9 and continued until their second year at upper secondary school. Each of the schools in the study is represented by two students in each category. From one of the schools we received, as the result of a misunderstanding, four students instead of two in both year 7 and year 9. A total of 24 girls and 22 boys took part in the study.
C1 (year 9) C2 (year 7) C3 (year 5)
Girls 10 8 6 Boys 688
Table 1. Number of girls and boys in the respective categories.
Of these 46 students 7 come from immigrant families. The students making up the sample were also asked to answer a simple questionnaire relating to their writing habits – the results of which revealed a great deal of variation between students, from those who kept a diary and often wrote letters, to those who only ever did any writing at school. Once we had finalised our sample of students we visited each of the schools involved. This visit served a number of purposes: we wished to establish a personal relationship, since we felt it was important that the students should have the opportunity to make the acquaintance of the person they were going to write to; we also wanted to make sure that the students had fully understood the aim of the study and the procedure we would be following; and at the same time we introduced the first round of correspondence. The most important function of this first meeting was its overall function – it enabled us to build up the students’ interest and make them feel committed to contributing to the project’s success. We wanted to ensure that the students realised that we were genuinely interested in their thoughts and experiences. In the following chapter we consider the writing process and the letter as a textual genre, but before that it may be useful to return to the title of the present chapter: Students as Partners in Research. What does this actually mean? We are not sure exactly when and how we decided to call our study Students as Partners in Research. When we presented the first draft of our project concept we gave it the tile “Student Panel”. We do know that an important source of inspiration for us was what is known in anthropology as “informants” (see for example Hannerz, 1983). An informant is a person who is familiar with the local, “native” culture, and whose assistance helps the anthropologist to keep abreast of various daily events in the environment under study; the informant can thus, to a certain extent, be seen as the anthropologist’s “research partner.” Kvale’s metaphorical description of the relationship between researcher and respondent in terms of “an explorer visiting an unknown continent”5 is
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relevant to the way we endeavoured to shape the relationship between ourselves as “researchers” and the students as our “partners in research”. We can view the project as a journey of exploration, on which we set off to explore an unknown continent (the school world) with the help of correspondence we have establis- hed for the purpose with the native population (the students). We find things out in the course of our journey, and attempt to reach an understanding of them in various ways, for example by using our own and other people’s theories regarding the unfamiliar country and its inhabitants, or by expressing what we have understood in small stories or reports which we send back to the natives together with the question: Have we understood you correctly here? During the course of the journey we ourselves will change. Our assumptions of what things are like “out there” will be put to the test – perhaps they will have to be revised? Perhaps the fact that they are the object of investigation will lead the native population to see their world in a different light? Another question which arises during the journey is whether we begin to approach a boundary beyond which our correspondents no longer can be said to belong to the local population, when they are no longer natives? Will this then mean that we discover completely different things, and what value will this knowledge have? Is it even the case that there is a value in our correspondents’ donning the researcher’s mantle, thus becoming something of guests in their own reality? Whatever the answers to these questions – fundamental questions in the field of ethnographic research – our definition of the respondents as our “partners in research” highlights the high degree of dependence and mutuality exisiting between both parties in qualitative research; and at the same time the use of the term “partners in research” points to the fact that the focus is on the students’ own experiences and definitions, and that it is what the students see that comprises the findings of this research project (for a further elaboration of this theme, see the discussion on methodology).
To Write is to Think In the national curriculum for compulsory school education from 1994 (a document referred to as Lpo94), and particularly in the subject syllabus for Swedish it includes, there is a clearly articulated view of language. The syllabus says: “Students acquire good language proficiency from using their langauge in meaningful contexts: speaking, reading, writing and thinking.” Language is thus seen as comprising equal proportions of speech, reading, writing and thought; for each of these four language skills specific objectives are formulated, towards which it is the task of teachers to lead their pupils. For instance, with regard to writing the syllabus says: “Students should develop the habit of writing as a means for establishing contact and for exercising influence, as an instrument for
5 Kvale, S. 1984
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thinking and learning, so that writing can fulfil the function of a valuable tool they can use in their continuing studies” (Lpo 94, p 103). It is nothing new to make a distinction between written language and spoken language – although at the time when written language began to come into use in Sweden the spoken and the written word were very close to each other. What was written corresponded to what the utterances in question sounded like in the various dialects, with elements of Danish and Norwegian mixed in. Norms governing how words should be written grew up in and around the power elites of the time, for example the clergy and the courts of law, although even here there were considerable variations – for example, in the early 18th century there were eleven different ways of spelling the simple Swedish word “och”, meaning “and”. There was a great need for standardisation of how words should be spelt, inflected and pronounced, and the development towards today’s Standard Swedish had begun. Even though there still exist considerable dialectal variations in the spoken language, there is now a Standard Swedish in use across the country, defined through the written language (see Westman 1995). That being said, the spoken language does not only differ from the written language in a lexical sense. Writing and speaking are actions which may on occasions have essentially different aims and results (see for example Garme, 1993, and Kotsinas, 1994). With regard to writing the educationalist Max van Manen puts forward some interesting views in the book “Researching Lived Experience”. van Manen takes as his departure point scientific writing, and maintains that the writing done within the human and social sciences cannot be separated from the scientific work. “Research does not merely involve writing: research is the work of writing – writing is its very essence”, he writes (1990, p 126). van Manan seems to be maintaining that scientific knowledge is not created until the researcher sits down at his desk, and he lists a number of “properties” which are inherent to writing and which qualify writing for defini- tion as a method – “writing is our method” (p 124). Many of these properties of scientific writing apply to reflective writing in general. Given that the writing of letters leads the writer to engage in reflective thought, van Manen’s thinking can make an important contribution to understanding the reliability of our data. van Manen’s position is that writing leads to and reinforces reflection. Writing separates us from what we know, although at the same time it takes us closer to what we know. When we reflect on ourselves using a textual idiom we are led to ask ourselves questions such as “Is this what I really mean?”, “Did I really write that – that’s really good/bad”, or“Maybe it would be better if I put it another way...”. Not until we have written down our thoughts can we see with certainty if we do actually know what we thought we knew: “Writing separates the knower from the known, but it also allows us to reclaim this knowledge and make it our own in a new and more intimate manner” (p 127). Writing also enables us to distance ourselves from our direct experience – and as a result we discover what we have learnt from this experience (we might call this “a difference that makes a difference”). van Manen’s term for this is
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“reflective awareness”, which we might paraphrase as the ability to look at things objectively. When we write, our experiences appear to us in a different light – we might for example come to understand something which at first felt like a big mistake as an important and instructive lesson when we read what we have written in our diary. The act of writing entails an orientation towards the universal and away from the contextual/personal. When we for example write about a specific situation and how we acted in it, it also becomes possible to translate those actions to other situations. van Manen maintains that reflective writing steers our ability to reflect on reality into a positive spiral, where our understanding of the world about us increases concurrently with our attempts to describe it. A further aspect of writing is that it makes reality abstract; at the same time it makes it concrete, although in a different form. This seeming paradox is resolved if we express it by saying “writing is a process of intellectualisation”; in other words it is about putting words to experiences. In saying what something is we are at the same time saying that there are a lot of things which this something is not. What we write does not reflect reality in all its facets, but it does make it comprehensible by alluding to general, common aspects. Writing helps us reflect in another way as well: what is written can be viewed as the writer’s testament. The subjective, through the agency of the printed text, becomes the object, according to van Manen. It is easier to remain at a distance from an object than from something subjective, and as a result we are more likely to be self-critical. “To write is to exercise self-consciousness”, writes van Manen (p 129), and maintains that writing pits the inner against the outer, the subjective self against the objective self, and the ideal against the real. To summarise Manen’s ideas we can say that writing entails increased reflection in the sense that when we write we
1) separate and confront ourselves with what we know; 2) establish a distance betwen ourselves and contextually limited actions; and 3) render our concrete and subjective thoughts abstract and objective.
Through the writing process we learn something about ourself which it would be difficult for us to encapsulate in spoken language.
The Letter as a Genre On the next logical level writing is about showing, demonstrating something. There are two aspects to this: the textual content of what we write demonstrates to others what we have seen, know, feel, have worked out; and we demonstrate how we think this should be understood by choosing a certain form for our text, a genre. Reading poetry as if it were prose will probably result in a reduced level of understanding of what the text is intended to communicate. Similarly, it is
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necessary to understand the specific genre which the students participating in our project have used for their writing. There are a number of different ways in which one can distinguish between different formats for presenting textual material. A text can be presented using an individual vehicle, as is the case with a diary, or a textual medium can be collective, as is the case for example with a committee report. Texts may have a defined author, as in the case of a novel, or they may be anonymous, as in the case of an advertisement. Texts can be private or public. The letters in this study are individual and they have a defined author. The letters have both a private and a public face: they are written in simple and personal style and in this sense they are private; but at the same time they have a place in a public context. The correspondence was carried on between a representative of a public authority and comprehensive school students, and its subject was life at school. The letters can also be seen as public documents produced for the purpose of illuminating and investigating school from the student perspective. The letter can be seen as a genre, or category of text. The letter as a literary genre has a long tradition, and there are many styles which can serve as a model. There are also conventional formats prescribing how letters should be written. The main emphasis of the letter as a genre is on description/narration, distribu- tion and receiving; the letter has a social and communicative function, it is part of a social context. The exchange of letters on which our study is based had as its aim to provide school students with the opportunity of airing their views on school – this gives the letters a social function. Their communicative function is related to how far they can be read without any prior understanding. If the texts are comprehensible they have a communicative function, and can thus be termed “self-contained texts” (see Josephson et al. 1990; Melin, 1995; Sandquist & Teleman, 1989). The letters in question can thus not be seen as isolated – they are included in a social and societal context. This fact affects the choice of content, form, style and language in the letters on the general level, as each individual student’s linguistic repertoir does on the individual level (Stubbs, 1996).
Our Themes In our letters to the students we gave clarity a high priority, and used the standard letter-writing conventions: we indicated the date, began with a greeting phrase and an introductory presentation of the letter’s content, and similarly rounded off the letters in the conventional manner with concluding greetings and postscripts. Our letters also contained summaries of previous rounds of the correspondence and the presentation of new aspects we wanted the students to think through and write about. The objective of the theme letters was to encourage the students to think and reflect inwardly, and also to recount events and activities in the “external
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world”. In the first letter we advised the students to consider the subjects we gave them carefully: “It might be a good idea for you to spend a few days, up to a week, thinking about what you are going to write.” We also encouraged the students to write freely and independently, not as if writing to an authority: “Look at the letters as if you were writing to a normal friend or pen-pal.” Throughout the duration of the project we provided the students with feedback and support relating to their writing. The following are examples of the kind of phrases we used: “Good luck with your writing in the future!”, “Tell me about break-times, I’m really curious to know more!”, “The things you’ve written are a great help to us in our research.” We also included personal comments such as “I hope you had a relaxing Christmas holiday.” The summaries we included of previous rounds in the correspondence varied in scope. The approach we adopted most frequently was to keep them fairly short – for example: “You and all the other students who are writing to us wrote very interesting and exciting letters. We have learnt a lot by reading what things are like for you all both at school and outside school”; or “A lot of the letters we received in the last round talked about how music fills a lot of important functions. Some people have music on in the background just about all the time, no matter what they’re doing, while others listen to a certain kind of music to create a certain kind of mood. It’s clear that you and the other students who are writing to us have a broad taste in music, or at least that you listen to a wide range of artists (quite a few of them are names I haven’t heard before). The artists mentioned most frequently in the letters are the Spice Girls, Backstreet Boys, Snoop Doggy Dogg, Metallica, Bob Marley and Nirvana.” In order to create a degree of variation in the genre, on three occasions we experimented with giving the theme letter a somewhat different form. In two cases we sent the students pictures of a projective nature, depicting typical school situations (letters 8 and 15). In the third case we sent out a “letter within a letter”, where a fictive student “stood in” as sender and recipient (letter 7a).
Our theme letters were about: Letter 1 Time at school – an ordinary day Letter 2 Student’s own thoughts and feelings concerning school work – self-confidence Letter 3 Relations with other people at school – Your class – Classmates Letter 4 Being a good or poor student at school Letter 5 Time at school – break-times Letter 6 Your views on the year just ended, and thoughts about next year at school Letter 7a Rules and codes at school Letter 7b Your first impression of upper secondary school Letter 9 Time at school – an ordinary day
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Letter 10 The importance of music in your life Letter 11 Being happy or feeling down Letter 12 The most important happenings of the year in your personal life Letter 13 Self-portrait in writing Letter 14 Your own tricks of the trade for getting what you want Letter 15 Associations aroused by two pictures
All the students generally received the same letter, with slight modifications in the language to suit the recipient’s age. In letter 7 there were two completely different themes, one for students at compulsory comprehensive school, and another for those who had just started upper secondary school. In the letters where students were asked to record the associations certain pictures triggered for them, we sent different pictures to the different age groups, although the motifs of the pictures were the same. The 28 students who did not join the project until the spring term of 1996 did not write letters 3 and 4, in order that the groups could be synchronised. The theme letters are presented in full in the “Research Report”.
The Correspondence Correspondence consists of two parallel processes: a thinking process and a writing process. These are initiated both individually and collectively, with an alternation between reading and writing (see Smith, 1982). In the letters we wrote we adopted a certain tone, and set out to provide direction and suggestions. The students accepted the challenge, interpreted the theme in their own respective ways, and then in turn themselves assumed the role of letter-writer. The following quote illuminates the interpretive work the students effected:
“When you said that we should write about ourselves I felt uncertain at first. But now I’m going to write about what I think I’m supposed to write about.”
The initiative was thereafter passed back to us: we assumed the role of letter- readers, we interpreted what we read and then wrote a new theme letter based on the thoughts and ideas in the students’ letters. Sometimes the theme letter was based solely on something which one or more students wrote to us about, if they had touched on something we wanted to find out their views on in greater detail; on other occasions the letter we sent was more open and did not attempt to steer the students’ responses in any way. Throughout, our objective was to make the correspondence as natural and enjoyable as possible, given the parameters in operation. Of course, using an exchange of letters as a research method means that it
18 A Good Enough School
is not possible to eliminate all “steering” of the respondents’ contributions – it is an inherent aspect of the method and of the letter as a genre. That being said, one can endeavour to ensure that the steering is done as “gently” as possible. The themes we asked the students to write about were defined in fairly wide terms, which meant that the students had a considerable degree of freedom when it came to choosing the form and content of their letters. This approach worked well in the majority of the letters, although two of the theme letters (4 and 7a) were not particularly successful: we noted that the students interpreted our letter as a questionnaire which we wanted them to respond to in questionnaire fashion. Several of the letters we received, especially from the younger students in the project, were set out as a series of points with a “question–answer” structure. It is also the case that there were certain students who allowed themselves to be steered more than others. Here, too, these were mainly students from the youngest age category who were not confident in their handling of the genre, or students who were anxious to show that they were co-operative and obliging. Anna-Malin Karlsson shows in her research that there is a considerable difference between how students write at school and how they write when outside school. By looking at “readers’ letters” sent to the national school students’ news magazine “Kamratposten”, and comparing those written during school hours with those students wrote in their spare time outside school, she found, among other differences, that the letters written at school had been given a frame typical of that used for school essays: name, class, heading, conclusion. In addition, she saw that the letters written in school time were only directed to a single reader, the teacher. In these letters the students write, not to inform, but to demonstrate that they know how to inform6 . Bearing this in mind we made a special, conscious effort to lift the writing out of the immediate school context – for example, we encouraged the students to write their letters in peace and quiet at home, and stated very clearly that the letters would not in any way be subjected to assessment or correction. Nevertheless the evidence suggests that some students, at least in the initial stages, found it difficult to get way from the way they write at school. With time, however, all the respondents gained a surer hand in wielding the genre of “corresponding-with-a-guy-at-the-National-Agency-for-Education”, and their tone of address became accordingly increasingly personal and direct, moving from “Dear National Agency for Education” to “Hi Crille!” (Crille being the very informal diminutive form of Christian). For one student, corresponding with us meant that he wrote the first letter of his life:
“Hello, this is actually the first time I’ve ever written a letter, but I think it’ll work out OK”. (Robin)
6 Karlsson’s study (available in Swedish only) is called “Textual Norms at School and Outside School – real and imaginary letters to the editor” (Textnormer i och utanför skolan – att skriva insändare på riktigt och på låtsas), Karlsson, 1997. See also Kotsinas, 1994, for a discussion of young people’s language.
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The fact that the students were corresponding with an authority does not appear to have had any significant effect on the way they wrote. One student was a bit precocious and requested information about the national grading system, but otherwise it was more usual for them to ask questions such as which music groups Christian likes, or if we could let them know of any “cool” Internet sites. Comments on the project were also quite a frequent occurrence (a total of 25 times), especially in the final letter:
“Above all I want to thank you for letting me take part and write to you in Stockholm, and I also hope that in some way we might have influenced the Agency in a positive way”. (Jonas) “And I want to say that it’s been really good fun writing these letters, partly because otherwise you don’t tend to really think hard about what you actually really think of school. I hope it all leads to some visible result in the end! Take care!” (Katarina)
The students also provided direct comments on our theme letters: “Hi! To start with I want to say that I’m glad you’ve chosen such a fun topic. A good choice!” (Kajsa on letter 10)
“I think this topic was a bit boring. It’s such an unoriginal question, but I’ve tried to do my best to answer it.” (Rebecka on letter 2)
A few of the students sent us postcards from their holidays, and we also received letters containing drawings and Christmas cards. In the beginning most students penned their letters by hand, but as time went on more and more of them started writing on a computer. One letter, for example, arrived late with the excuse that the ink cartridge in the student’s printer had run out. Having been received and read, all the letters were transcribed and coded. In the transcription process all personal names, place names and names of schools were replaced with codes. We also counted the number of words in the letters, and categorised them according to sex and age.
526 Letters After a total of five terms’ correspondence, where 18 students had the opportun- ity to write 15 letters and 28 students could write a maximum of 13 letters, the maximum number of letters we could have received was 634. The drop-out rate was 17 per cent, so instead we received a total of 526 letters. A detailed account of the drop-out profile, with an analysis of gender and age differences, and of any effect the drop-out may have had on the findings, is presented in the Research Report.
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Processing and Analysing the Letters
As soon as we had received all the letters belonging to a given round of correspondence we read through them and, guided by what the students had written, started thinking about the content of our next theme letter. However, we did not read the letters solely in order to get ideas for our continuing correspondence with the students – a parallel process was in progress throughout, as we worked to achieve an understanding of what we read by applying various kinds of content analysis (see below). In this initial analytical work we looked for prominent and frequently occurring patterns discernible in the correspondence as a whole. During this period we carried out on-going thematically oriented studies of the letters received, which resulted in three interim reports: “Students’ Powerlessness to Affect School Time”; “Strangeness”; and “A Hug from Mum – A consideration of helps and hindrances in schoolchildren’s lives” (Lundahl & Öquist, 1996a; 1996b; 1997). In early 1998 we began the final analytical stage, based on the complete correspondence material. Parallel with this we conducted interviews with a selection of our respondents. These components of the research process and the work which has resulted in this book are presented in the Research Report.
Powerlessness – Strangeness – Helps and Hindrances In our first interim report – “Students’ Powerlessness to Affect School Time” – we pointed to the tension that exists in the relationship between students’ own time (which we call circular time) and the linear measurement of time exercised by school. Students’ description of how they experience time at school fluctuates between terms such as “slow”, “meaningless”, “stressful”. Pleasure is experienced at break-times, in free lessons, and in subjects such as Art, Physical Education, Woodwork. When, in our second report – Strangeness – we studied the occurrence of the unusual and unexpected within the normal school day, we saw how students off their own bat filled their time with exciting content, while the official, timetabled school day was completely lacking in such elements. In the third report – A Hug from Mum – we were struck by the double-edged nature of the helps and hindrances children encounter in their everyday life. When we studied this in relation to the students’ particular school, teachers, school-friends and home life we discovered that what was a help for one student might very well be a hindrance to another student; this found expression, for example, in connection with the transition from one school-year to the next. A further element which we found to have both a helping and a hindering effect was schools’ use of tests and assessments. All in all, we found that the decisive factor in making things a help or a hindrance was the way in which the individual student conceives his/her own world. The first of our interim reports can be said to describe daily school life in more structural terms; the second report was also primarily descriptive, but its
21 A Good Enough School
focus was on phenomena which did not belong to the ordinary and everyday; in the third report we again focused on everyday life at school, but this time the emphasis was on functional aspects. Our analysis of the letters in preparation for writing the three interim reports was such that we read 46 letters for our work on the first report, 189 letters for the second report, and for the third report 397 letters. In producing these three reports we were guided to a large extent by the phenomenographical method (see also Alexandersson, 1994; Larsson, 1986; Uljens, 1989). Briefly, this meant that our work was structured in the following stages: the first stage of the analysis entailed acquainting ourselves with the mate- rial. We read the letters through one at a time, and discussed the overall impression we had both received from them as a whole. The next stage was to define the phenomenon7 by establishing criteria. In this work two questions acted as our guide: What does the phenomenon entail? What is it concerned with? We then asked ourselves what different descriptions of the phenomenon could be found in the correspondence material; we looked for patterns and threads which gave the phenomenon meaning and significance. What is described? What subject matter is used in the description and how is the phenomenon described? Finally, we developed analytical categories and under- pinned our findings with a conceptual and theoretical base. Our initial studies provided us with an increased understanding of how students perceive and tackle their everyday life, in interaction with teachers, friends and various institutional arrangements. The phenomenographical framework we applied when beginning our analysis also, to a certain extent, underlay the concluding analytical work, but was widened from its original scope, which was primarily concerned with descriptions of students’ everyday life and situation, to a perspective which primarily focused on the student as a cultural phenomenon. This shift took us away from phenomenography proper and an orthodox methodological perspective, towards an angle that could be termed “cultural analysis”. In their “Handbook of Ethnology” the authors Billy Ehn and Orvar Löfgren discuss this approach to understanding culture and cultures:
“Human behaviour is ambiguous: it consists of many more layers of meaning and signification than we intend or can manage to keep track of. Viewed from this perspective, cultural analysis represents an attack on common sense, on the “obviousness” of normality. As a result of the analysis unexpected parallels are discovered, as are hitherto unnoticed differences. Opposites surprise us by being seen to require each other, or they may even merge into one. This same way of reasoning can show
7 The word phenomenon is derived from the Greek noun phainomenon, which means “that which shows itself”. In other words, what we are concerned with is not the ”thing in itself”, i.e. reality as it is indepen- dent of our perception or experience of it; instead, our central consideration is that which presents itself to our consciousness (from Alexandersson, 1994, pp 68 ff).
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laws to be the antithesis of order, and we see how goodness often contains evil. Having discovered a concealed order in chaos we then set out to seek chaos in what appears to be order.” (Ehn & Löfgren, 1982, p 104)
Cultural analysis endeavours to reveal what is concealed behind things which routine and habit have led us to perceive as given or unchangeable; “an attack on common sense”. There are different ways of going about this (see for example Thavenius, 1995; and Andersson, 1998) but the approach we adopted was to work with similarities and differences, to compare and discriminate, to move between the general and the particular.
From the General to the Particular... In order to increase our understanding of the textual material we elected to supplement our thematic analyses with a study of the students on the individual level. What we were interested in here was linking our reading and interpretations of the correspondence as a whole to a deeper understanding of the thought patterns of individual students. One tried and tested method for investigating individual thought patterns is the technique known as the “grid interview”8 (which is described in greater detail in the Research Report). For practical reasons and owing to time considerations we were obliged to limit this part of the study to a selection of individual students. By first excluding all those students who had not taken part in at least 75 per cent of the rounds of correspondence we restricted the number from whom the selection was to be made to 31 individuals. The reason why we applied this quantitative selection criterium was that we wished to have access to as large a volume of text per individual as possible, since the letters were to serve as the basis for the interview. We then read the letters written by these 31 students at the individual level, in order to identify the features which were most typical for each respective individual. Using a formal criterium for information/meaning (see Research Report) we were able to isolate, for each individual student, those passages of their writing with the greatest level of signification. In order to restrict the frame for our selection still further we decided that we would only interview those students whose letters had yielded seven or more “signification-bearing” passages. Thirteen girls and six boys were included in our definitive selection of interviewees. Of these, one student was chosen for a test of the formal criterium, and in addition one girl and one boy were unable to attend their interview. We thus conducted a total of 16 grid interviews. The resultant “grid portraits” are presented in an appendix to the Research Report.
8 The “grid interview” technique was developed by the psychologist George Kelly (1955). Among its applications the method has been used to investigate and analyse students’ and teachers’ perceptions of teaching and of classoom climate. Häckner et al. 1996.
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... And Back to the General In the aim of understanding the 16 portraits we obtained using the grid interviews we took as a reference point Max van Manen’s “lifeworld existentials”. In his book “Researching Lived Experience” (which we have previously quoted) van Manen describes four fundamental existential themes: “Lived Space”, “Lived Body”, “Lived Time”, and “Lived Other”, which we found to be productive categories when asking questions of and reflecting on our textual material. van Manen writes that these “lifeworld existentials” are particularly useful as an aid in stimulating reflection and pointing the way to an understanding of human experience; they reflect the way a person’s life is lived in the physical environment, in the body, in time, and in relationships with other people, and can be seen as the basis of all human experience, irrespective of the individual’s historical, cultural and social background.
Lived space refers to the dimensions in human life relating to how we experience our daily existence, whether we “feel at home” or “feel like strangers”. The home is the only place where we can be utterly ourselves, writes van Manen (p 102). Lived space is thus concerned with the landscape each person moves in and has to navigate through. Lived body refers to the fact that we are bodies, and move among other bodies. In our encounters with other bodies “critical” or “admiring” looks are exchanged (p 104). We live in the midst of looks, eyes which see us, and we are affected by these glances to a considerable degree. Lived body is about our physical, bodily presence in the world, and how our bodily dimension is mirrored in the other people we encounter. Lived time refers to subjective time, in contrast to clock time, which is objective time. Time flies by when we’re having fun, and drags mercilessly when we’re bored. Time, in the present, in our personal history and in the future we envisage for ourself, shapes our temporary horizons. Through our hopes and expectations we can work on the feelings we have in the present (p 104). Lived other refers to the importance of relationships with other people if we are to experience a meaning in life. In contrast to “lived body”, “lived other” relates to charged, unique, especially important meetings with another person which we feel change our life. The relationships between children and adults, or between students and their teachers are examples of such charged meetings or relationships, when they entail a fundamental experience of support and security (pp 105–106).
These four “lifeworld existentials” can be looked at individually for analytical purposes, but in reality they cannot be separated from each other. Together they form “an intricate unity which we call the lifeworld – our lived world”. van Manen goes on to add: “In a research study we can temporarily study the existentials in
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their differentiated aspects, while realising that one existential always calls forth the other aspects” (p 105). van Manen’s “existentials” functioned as a tool which we could use to assist our understanding when attempting to identify similarities and differences between the students we interviewed. We saw that the individuals had varying “weight” in the respective “existentials”. Together with Kelly’s “Personal Construct Theory”, which provided us with insights into the students’ personal thought patterns, van Manen’s ideas enabled us to link general constructs with personal constructs. In this way we were able to generate new theoretical models for analysing how school affects and is perceived in students’ lifeworld. As a result of a process whereby we experimented with various angles and juxtapositions of van Manen’s concepts (the four lifeworld existentials) and the concepts generated by the students themselves (personal constructs), new constructs, new patterns of meaning, emerged, although these were now on a different “logical” level. These new constructs could be understood as different aspects of the “school world” (cf. the scope of the concept of “lifeworld” above). In one sense it is correct to say that each of the seven schools included in our project is a unique school, with its own history, culture and social life; but at the same time it is equally correct to say that the schools are also “all schools” in that they share certain transcending features. In the first section of Part Two of this book, which deals with the findings of our research, we discuss these fundamental aspects of the “school world” using the metaphors The Hall of Mirrors, Fragmentation, Lighting, and Drug Trade (what these metaphors signify is examined in the chapter “The School World”). The same applies to the students. Each of the 46 young people who wrote us letters has his or her unique mode of thinking, his or her own, utterly individual life history and cultural and social background. However, that being said these students are also “all students”; they have certain transcending features in common, through their shared experience of being young people today, and of what it is like to be a school student. The second chapter in Part Two presents the metaphor “the Strategists”, which spotlights the students’ individual methods for gaining the upper hand over the conditions of life at school. In our analysis we have moved back and forth between the universal and the individual; we have found that this “double vision”, with which we have looked at both the individual students and the schools in the study, has had a bonus effect in the form of new concepts and a profounder understanding of life at school and the ways in which school affects students’ lives as a whole. Without our detailed study of the individual we might well have missed seeing the universal dimension, and had we not on occasions raised our gaze to encompass what the material as a whole had to tell us, we would only have been able to understand the individual students in the light of their separateness.
PART 2 Findings
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PART 2 Findings
To close the circle, then, we looked again at the whole of the textual material we had gathered, and re-read it in the light of our new metaphors. In this work we adopted a phenomenographical approach (see above), with the metaphors serving as “phenomena”. As we read the text we marked those passages in which the respective phenomena/metaphors occurred, and classified them according to 18 various “sub-categories” which reflect the different aspects of the phenomena9 . We found that 24 per cent of the total volume of text could be classified under one or more of the metaphors for the “School World” and/or under “The Strategists”. All in all we classified 558 passages from 390 letters (74 per cent of the letters). One question that presents itself is, What does the rest of the textual material consist of? Three per cent of the total volume of text consists of what is called “metatext” – i.e. introductory and concluding greeting phrases, questions and viewpoints concerning the study, or excuses for poor spelling or handwriting or for a letter’s late arrival. This leaves 73 per cent of the volume of text. Without having effected any detailed analysis of this textual material we can say that to a large extent it was concerned with hobbies and leisure pursuits, sporting achievements, journeys, family, or general thoughts and reflections about life outside school. There are also a good many descriptions and enumerations of everyday events of no direct relevance to our study – for example:
“I do my homework, talk to Mum about it, have tea, phone one of my friends, watch TV, etc... To be honest, I actually go to bed about nine, because if I didn’t I’d be too tired. I always set my stereo to turn itself off after I’ve fallen asleep.” (Erika)
However, this kind of text is not meaningless: it helps the story move forward, and is what makes the text a letter. It is part of the writing process. On average we classified 12 passages per student, with the number per individual student ranging from 1 to 31. The covariance between the number of classified passages and the total number of written words at the individual level
9 In this phase of the analysis we made use of the data processing program QSR NUD*IST. This program quantifies the text in terms of the number of “textual units” it contains. It also keeps account of which letters the text in the analytical categories comes from, and also makes it possible to perform statistical analyses on each categorisation.
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is 0.84. This means that there is a direct connection between the number of times each individual’s text is classified and the length of the letters he/she wrote. The Research Report presents the statistical scatter, the number of classified passages and the covariance between length of text and coding for each separate age category and for male versus female students. In the following we will not be presenting all of the 558 passages; instead we have chosen those quotes which best reflect the different aspects of our four “school world” metaphors. Our approach in selecting the quotes was contrastive and dialectic: we have aimed to contrast what is easy for one student with what another student finds problematical; a source of light for one student is contrasted against what is a black hole for another, and so on. We also allow the quotes to “talk to each other” – what one student has to say is elucidated or qualified by the voice of another student. The quotes presented in the chapter entitled “The Strategists” have primarily been chosen from a dialectical perspective, in order to reflect the situation of the individual vis-à-vis the basic conditions of life at school. Each section of our account of our findings begins with an introduction, based on the grid interviews, of the students who were our main guides in that particular area of our analysis.
The “School World”
The Hall of Mirrors The metaphor “hall of mirrors” relates to the collective nature of school. Students constantly see ”the other” in themselves and themselves in “the other”10 . Walking around in the hall of mirrors all day you see yourself in a positive or negative light. To take an example from the letters, Saskia writes:
“(In middle secondary school [i.e. comprehensive school for ages 14-16]) you have to be so perfect, so slim and good-looking, you’ve always got to be so cool, but (in lower secondary [i.e. comprehensive school for ages 11-13]) you could be however you wanted to be.”
The mirrors provide models, styles, which students can imitate or reject. The mirrors give me an idea of how extreme I can be in pursuing any particular
10 The father of the “mirror theory”, the American philosopher Georg Herbert Mead, maintains that to understand a person’s behaviour we should examine how that person perceives themself in relation to their environment. By reflecting themselves in other people’s reactions individuals become conscious of themselves; the individual observes and interprets howa others react and attempts to enter into how the other looks at the world. “The other” refers to people who for some reason are important in the individual’s life, such as parents, friends, idols, teachers. The development of the self is therefore never static, Mead maintains: it is dynamic, a process of constant change conditioned by what happens in the interaction between the individual and his/her environment (for further elucidation, see for example Thuen & Sveinung, 1989).
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direction, and they show me what is required if I am to fit in. One of the behaviour patterns students can adopt in the hall of mirrors is to always make sure that they fit in; they let every mirror shape them. Why is it that in almost every class there is a princess, a clown and a professor? Perhaps the answer is that a classroom contains a lot of mirrors which create larger-than-life figures, functioning as a kind of magic lantern. At the same time, for these magnifying mirrors to work constants are required: a backdrop of ordinary mirrors. In a class there is always a group of students, usually girls, who are never conspiciuous, who are like wallpaper. In our material we have Filippa, who views both herself and life as a whole as a reflection in a mirror. She was “dead certain” she would be given a lower grade, but in fact ended up with a strong “4” (on a scale of 1–5, where 5 is the highest grade), her comment on which achievement was “it doesn’t matter either way, as long as people think you’re a nice person”. She had a phase in year 8 when she had a punkish style:
“I wasn’t exactly invisible or quiet as a mouse”, but
“I’ve given up that style now, it felt a bit childish and it wasn’t in any more”.
She thinks
“There’s no way I’m going to feel ugly tomorrow. If I get a good night’s sleep tonight I’ll look really good.”
Mirror, mirror, on the wall... Another dweller in the hall of mirrors is Petter, a boy caught in constant conflict between outsiderhood and normality:
“Me, Kalle and Niklas are into the Rolling Stones. There’s a bit of a risk involved in being different /.../ In some of the other classes I’ve seen that you can get teased if you like un-modern music”; or
“If you’re good at a sport or hobby the others at school think more of you. If you’ve got a lot of friends at school you don’t need to be anything more than good-looking”.
Petter “balances on a knife-edge”11 – not too much, not too little. Almost all of
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Petter’s letters are about daring to be oneself, and anxiety in case he should find himself outside the community. Nastaran is another student who moves through the hall of mirrors, but she does so in a manner which differs from Filippa and Petter. She does all she can to avoid being seen, to merge with the wallpaper. She says that she “likes baggy clothes”, and she avers that in her world, “mostly we don’t have any problems”.
“If ever there’s an argument they try to make us be friends again. If anyone gets something wrong the rest of us don’t laugh, and if anyone drops anything, we help them.” “If I could decide, everyone would be equally clever, with no geniuses and no stupid people. Everyone would be in-between”.
In much of what she writes in her letters, Nastaran dwells in a world of harmonious togetherness – which enables her to steer clear of unpleasant confrontations and avoid having to assume the responsibility for conflicts.
“I’m a White Nigga” Thomas Ziehe looks in some depth at a phenomenon he calls “cultural drift”, by which he means that young people today are living in a world where traditions have lost their meaning and importance, a world in which young people construct their personality from scraps and fragments which they garner from all the media which are more and more coming to dominate our society (see for example Ziehe in Fornäs et al. 1984). When our correspondents write about style they are referring to aesthetic judgements, for example what kind of make-up to use, how to dress. A teenager can choose a particular life-style, which is linked with certain practices, forms of cultural expression, music, fashion etc. When Filippa writes “I’ve given up that style now” this is an expression of what “cultural drift” entails: being cut adrift from one’s heritage and environment, and free to choose something new. Joakim provides what is perhaps the best illustration of what is meant here:
“I often get irritated by people who say ’white people can’t rap – rap is
11 Peter Woods writes about “balancing on a knife-edge”: “Lynda Mysor and I came across numerous examples of this ‘knife-edging’ behaviour in our research on pupil transfer between middle and upper schools. We argued that this was fundamentally a matter of identity, and that all pupils aspired towards their concept of the ’normal pupil’ though, of course, that might be different for different groups. For example, deviant boys did not wish to appear clever, but they also shunned being considered ‘thick’.” (1990, p 131)
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niggas’ music’. Skin colour doesn’t matter, and nowadays nigga is a word for all of us hip-hoppers. For example, Ice Cube is a black nigga, and I’m a white nigga.”12
Music is an important identity marker for the students in our study13 . Music can be used to reinforce and demonstrate the particular style a student has; but equally, music can also embody a style a student aspires to or has decided to adopt. Music is often closely associated with clothes and attitude in the students’ texts:
“Listening to music affects your behaviour and the way you dress”,
Destan writes. Using music I can indicate clearly to others who I am and what I represent:
“I guess that generally speaking, you listen to music you want to identify with – identify with your own image of that particular style, and the image you have is based on the image you want to have of your own life.”
Lina provides examples:
“The skateboarders have their own style and music – cool techno and that kind of stuff. The left-wing lot wear wacky clothes and listen to unusual music /.../ ’CREEPS’ listen to every kind of music and wear ordinary clothes”.
At school music is used to indicate that one belongs to, or to announce that one has nothing to do with, various groupings of fellow students. Every school/class has its dominant music culture, or alternatively a collection of several equally strong influences – from only one of the schools in the study did the students write that the school did not have any particularly dominant music culture. The style or styles which dominate at a particular school is largely determined by the students who attend it. Bernad writes:
“My school has a pretty (very) high proportion of immigrants (80%), so
12 In Sernhede (1996, p 65 ff.) there is a discussion of the phenomenon of ‘white niggas’ as a feature of modern exoticism – it is an expression of white subcultures’ fascination for black ghetto culture with its preoccupation with violence, physical strength and death. The key attributes are to be “bad”, “hard”, and “cool”. 13 For a more in-depth discussion of the place of music in the life of young people, see for example Bjurström (1993), Spelar rocken någon roll (“Does rock have a role?”); Fornäs, J. et al. (1988) Under rocken. Musikens roll i tre unga band (“Rock solid: the role of music in three young bands”); and Trondman, M. (1989) Rocksmaken. Om rock som symboliskt kapital (“Rock Taste. Rock as symbolic capital”).
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hip-hop is the most popular kind of music.”
Conny writes in a similar vein:
“I’ve moved to a different school for upper secondary /.../ My old school had a a lot of immigrants [not the same school as Bernard wrote about] so there was a lot of hip-hop, rap and that kind of stuff. At my new school most people listen to Energy kind of music (14).”
Writing about music tastes in his class, Jesper says
“There’s a Suede gang and a Peter André gang. I hate Suede so if I was forced to choose I’d probably join the latter gang, even though you could scarcely say that I worship Peter André.”
The students in the study often also express the viewpoint that different music styles are gender-determined. Moa writes that
“Boys tend to listen to ’harder’ music than girls”,
while another student, Joel, writes:
“In my class it’s generally so that the boys like Blur, Oasis, Brainpool and stuff like that. I don’t know exactly what the girls are in to, but usually they like boy bands, that kind of thing. The girls who listen to Backstreet Boys are more childish than the ones who prefer Celine Dion or Whitney Houston. It’s the same among the boys.”
We can let Jonas round off this section on music as an identity marker, with a quote in which he arraigns boy bands:
“The girls of course listen to bands with four guys with their hair in basin cuts and desperate expressions on their faces, who stand there singing in their silkiest voices about how much they love girls.”
Dressed for Success Through the music they listen to young people can tell the world who they are, and this communication can be amplified by the clothes they choose to wear (it can be pointed out here that school students in Sweden do not wear uniform).
14 ‘Energy’ is a radio station which plays a lot of modern dance music.
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Your clothes show which grouping you belong to:
“One thing’s certain, and that is that they’re skateboarders. You can tell by how far the seat of their trousers hangs down!”
Erika writes. But at times “simple” considerations are just as important, such as feeling clean and comfortable. There are several students in our sample who do not belong to any particular subculture, but who nevertheless have a great need to feel that other people notice them. Ylva, writing about an ordinary day at school:
“I remember that I’ve got to look something up for an essay, and slip in to the library. As I walk in the compliments start flowing and eyes start following me, because of my clothes. I often tend to dress pretty sexily, it’s just the way I am.”
In the same way as a school can have a music culture where a particular style is dominant, there may also be a particular clothes culture – for example:
“If you want to be liked, make sure you wear nothing but Peak Perforamnce clothes” (Erika).
For some people, whether or not they find the right clothes in the morning can make or break their whole day; the worst thing that can happen to them is to ”feel wrong”. Filippa, who lives for the recognition of creating the right reflection, shows how important it is for her in the following quote where she cannot find a particular pair of shoes:
“Mum, why’ve you hidden my Bally shoes? ‘Actually I need them today, because I’m going to blah-blah-blah...‘To try and give my Mum a bad conscience I said ‘OK, then I’ve got to change all my clothes, and that means I’ll be late for school.’ ‘What are you being so silly for? You can have your brown shoes with what you’ve got on!’ ‘Mum, you’re mad. You don’t understand anything about fashion! Of course I can’t.’‘I went into my room and pretended to be changing my clothes and having huge problems finding the right combination. Mum tried to get me to hurry up, but Uh-Uh! No way. ‘Well thanks a lot, Mum, now I’ll have to WALK to school.’ I dashed out in a temper. Once I was out of sight I lit a rebellious cigarette.”
However, clothes cost money:
“I don’t really have any really nice clothes, everything I’ve got is ugly!
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Plus, my Mum says I’ve got to buy all my clothes myself, but it’s not on. I don’t get all my child allowance, like most of my friends do, I only get about 150 crowns a month.” (Felicia) 15
Another student, Saskia, writes:
“The only thing my friends go on about is that they have to go to the hairdresser’s, and ’what hairstyle shall I choose, I’m going to buy new shoes and a dress and a ring and a necklace and and and. It’s a pain in the arse after a while when you can’t afford any of that yourself!”
For students who can’t afford to keep up with fashion, school can sharpen their envy and feeling of being fitted with financial tethers. The students’ texts concerning clothes are about the desire to be seen, and about not always being able to achieve that aim.
The Soap Opera “Life at School” School is more than just a cat-walk where students, suffering from various degrees of stage-fright, parade in front of each other’s approving or disapproving eyes; school has rather the character of a soap opera, in which students are constantly given opportunities to mirror themselves in new events and actions. School is a place where every kind of intrigue gets plotted, where there are people with every imaginable kind of problem; people experience success and failure (see the chapter “Drug Trade” for a discussion of how students “reflect themselves” by comparing grades and test results), joy and sorrow; love is kindled, love is crushed; school is a place where the rifts between the sexes, between different age groups, and between different ethnic identitites and social classes can be starkly illuminated or bridged over. School, like a soap opera, reflects all dimensions of life (cf. Everdahl, 1998). In the students’ accounts of life at school, and especially of the interaction which takes place between students at break-times or unofficially in the classroom, the dominant feature is descriptions of friendship, betrayal, intriguing, and love (and its attendant anguish). Frequent mention is made in the letters to best friends. A best friend is someone who stands by you, who lifts you up when you feel down. One might say that a best friend functions a bit like a pocket mirror, always available to assist in small adjustments to physical appearance and way of acting. Among the younger students there is a regular reshuffling of best friends; the older students tend to
15 150 crowns is approximately £14.
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have dropped the qualifier “best”, and refer simply to their friends – if they use the term ”best friend” it is usually in inverted commas. This is what Nastaran writes when she is in year 6:
“Pia and me aren’t best friends any more. She’s really stupid. But me and Erika are still best friends, and I’ve got a new best friend, though she’s really an old best friend, called Ninna, who’s in my class. We were best friends in class 4 and part of class 5, but then we fought and were just friends. But now, in class 6, we’re best friends again.”
Finding a best friend, or a real friend, can change a person’s whole life. Jesper writes about this, in terms which sound as if he had fallen in love for the first time:
“An important thing which happened during the past year was when I made friends with a boy who started in the same class as me in year 7. At first he – we can call him X - and I didn’t have that much to do with each other. But when a lot of the others in our class stopped wanting to be with me and turned against me he was the only one who stayed by my side. It was actually the first time in my life that I have felt that I have a real friend, someone I can trust. It’s the first time I’ve had someone to turn to if things are tough. What was even better was that I discovered that X thought it was just as much fun being with me as I did with him. Because of X I got more self-confidence, and dared to say what I thought much more often than before. /.../ X is kind and thoughtful, he’s nice and has quite a good sense of humour. I can talk to X about whatever I want to and he hardly ever minds. In other words he’s a real friend!”
Just as much as it was a boost for Jesper to find a real friend, so it was a painful blow to Filippa when she lost her best friend – she writes:
“Loyalty is important. I lost my very best friend recently, when I found out that she’d lied to me about important and personal things. Ugh! It’s just like divorce when you split up with your closest friends! We’d been “best friends”, I mean REALLY close, for about seven years! I’ve got to stop writing about it now, because my mascara isn’t waterproof, and I can’t think about it without bursting into tears.”
Petter has also drunk the bitter cup of deceit:
”“When I feel down it’s usually when they’ve been teasing me at school. But the day before yesterday (Friday) it was even worse because my
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friend told me that the girl I fancy had been talking bad about me, saying I was ugly and stuff like that, but I wonder if she really thought so before she knew I fancied her, because we nearly always talked to each other at the bus-stop and stuff, she even came to the party me and some friends had.”
Deceit is one reason why a person can lose a best friend, mate or friend. Another reason, which some of the girls in our study write about, is “theft” – when people steal each other’s friends. Yaminna gives an example of this:
“When we were in year 9 there was another girl from the same country as me. And she really made me want to throw up. She was actually my best friend, you could say, but she took all my friends so I felt all alone. I hated her, she thought she was really something.”
Stealing friends is in turn one example of the many school intrigues which the students, and especially the younger girls in the study, describe. An intrigue may be enormously complex, involving several individuals over an extended period of time. Felicia can provide our example here, with her description of one of the different intrigues she wrote about in her letters. In this case the intrigue lasted for about the duration of a break-time. The seeds were sown on an outdoor activities day, when the class was divided up into groups which had different tasks to complete:
“Quite a few days later we heard that everyone who had done swimming could take part in a fashion show. That meant that Lill was the only girl from our class who could go. Lill’s a pretty girl, and she’s a bit soppy and not very clever. All the boys fancy her, so we other girls in the class are jealous, and are always looking to get our own back. Maria and Ellinor were a bit sad and jealous, but me, Hannele and Greta were furious!! We talked bad behind Lill’s back at every break-time, and protested to our teacher. On the day when Lill came back from the fashion show we were angry and refused to speak to her. We were so angry that we didn’t see that we’d upset her, but at break-time she told us. So we answer that she’s actually made a fool of herself. Maria always tends to speak her mind right out, and now she tells us she’s chosen sides – Lill’s! Lill asks us if we can say sorry, so I do. Hannele and Greta run away, Greta runs a long way off and Hannele doesn’t go that far away. After a while she comes over to me and starts crying on my shoulder. I also start crying, and Ellinor comes over and says that Lill is crying. I suspect that Greta’s also somewhere crying. I hand over Hannele to Ellinor and go to look for Greta. There’s only one
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person who can comfort her now: me. When I find her I tell her that Lill is crying, and I can see tears on Greta’s face. Then she goes. Hannele comes over to me and we stand there comforting each other. Hannele has also said sorry now. She tells me it’s partly because of Maria’s hard words that she’s crying. The whole thing ends in hugs, tears and more hugs. Then the bell goes for the end of break-time.”
Felicia was in year 5 when she wrote this. She had been asked to write about what she usually did at break-times. It is clear that this episode had lessons to teach – though exactly what it was that Felicia learned is not easy to say. Some more typical scenes from Life at School can round off this chapter. If intrigues are mostly described in girls’ letters, fights and toughness are the equivalent in letters written by boys. There tends to be at least one person in every class who is a bit tougher than the rest, someone it’s best not to get on the wrong side of. Jens writes:
“There’s a guy in my class who thinks he’s dead tough. Nobody wants to be in his bad books, so everyone sucks up to him a bit. I make sure I never get into an argument with him or anything. One day we had to change where we sat, and I didn’t like that, so I went up to the board, where our new places were drawn up, and wrote “rubbish” over all the places and names. The teacher saw it and told me to rub it out, while the “tough” guy asked who did it, and everyone said it was me. “What!” he shouted, and was really surprised, because I don’t usually do anything like that as a rule. I went up and rubbed it out, and all the places got rubbed out, and then I threw the eraser at the board so that it bounced onto the floor. The ‘tough’ boy was surprised again, and said “I didn’t think he was like that”. Since then he’s had a better opinion of me, and I’m glad about that.”
Jens probably fell in his teacher’s esteem as a result of this, but the gain in his status in the eyes of the tough boy almost certainly outweighed this as far as Jens was concerned.16 Boys are not the only ones who have to settle who is the “leader” of the class. Jonas describes his class in the following way:
16 The wish to partake of the “tough boy’s ” aura is described with pinpoint accuracy in Roddy Doyle’s novel Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha: “I watched Charles Leavy. I studied him. I did his twitch. I did his shoulder. I made my eyes go small. When my da left, or even my ma, I was going to head the imaginary ball. I was going to go out and play. I was going to go into school the next day with all my homework done. I wanted to be like Charles Leavy. I wanted to be hard. I wanted to wear plastic sandals, smack them off the ground and dare anyone to look at me. Charles Leavy didn’t dare anyone; he’d gone further than that: he didn’t know they were there. I wanted to get that far. I wanted to look at my ma and da and not feel anything. I wanted to be ready.”
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“Jenny = the leader, she’s sure of herself and often takes command. Andrea = not as smart, loud-mouthed and giggly. Tessan = wants to be like Jenny. PS, giggly. Martina = no self-confidence, but sticks to And- rea. Filippa = a second leader, people almost view her as a boy. Mia = quite sure of herself, laughs a lot. They’re the only girls I’m going to write about, they’re the only ones who kick up a fuss.”
Every group has a leader; what Jens and Jonas are describing here is “hidden” leadership. It is probably not always the same person who functions as leader in every situation – one can imagine that different students have different status ratings in different contexts. A student who has a low position in Mathematics may for example have high status in Physical Education (see for example Max in the chapter called “The Strategists”). For students who are not able to gain promotion in the officially sanctioned arena there is a wealth of space and opportunity to assert themselves in the backyards and alleyways of the school world:
“At my school, Stina School, we’ve had three fights this autumn term. After two of them people had to go to hospital. In the first fight it was 4 against 1, and 3 of the 4 were immigrants. The victim (the one who was by himself) had to go to hospital in an ambulance”,
writes Maria. The background to this episode was a fight for supremacy between two rival gangs at the school, an immigrant gang and a gang of Swedish students. The conflict received a lot of attention in the letters from the six students attending the school in question.
Rites of Passage at School There is, finally, one more dimension to the mirroring described in the letters: the question of age, of getting older. The students write about “the big kids in year 9” or “the little playschool kids”. Students can gain self-confidence from mirroring themselves in those who are younger, and looking up to the students higher up in school can give them something to look forward to. Petter writes:
“The only positive thing about starting in year 7 (in a school consisting of classes from year 6 up to year 9) is that you aren’t the smallest any more – I know we won’t be, because I checked out the kids in year 5 at my old school and they looked like we did in year 3 or 4. And that’s not all, they scream and shout ten times as much as we did. We’ll also be rid of the ninth formers, there are always 9th formers but the 9th formers who’ll be finishing this year are even pushier than normal.”
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Ylva writes about starting at upper secondary school:
“You come here to learn, and there aren’t any little kids under your feet any more.”
Moving up a stage is a very concrete way of gauging your development:
“Just think: next year I’ll be the oldest in the whole of our (lower- secondary) school. The ones who are oldest always know best.” (Felicia)
The students’ texts concerning the transitions and change-overs they experience in the school system call to mind the anthropological concept of rites of passage.17 The students leave one age behind them, for example going to lower secondary school – separation – and start at middle secondary school where everything is new and unfamiliar, and where they once again find themselves to be the youngest. Year 7 in the Swedish school system (the age at which students start at middle secondary school) is about being “in between”, having no status, no legal rights – liminality. In year 8 students begin finally to be able to identify with their new status; they are included in the new community and are given certain rights – incorporation. Rites of passage facilitate and accelerate
17 See for example Peoples & Baily (1994, 3rd edition)
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development. The whole of a student’s school career can be understood in terms of a series of successive departure-points and trials which steer them step by step towards adulthood. Thus we might say that the “hard school of life” actually begins at school.
A Question of Ethics and Aesthetics The “hall of mirrors” refers to school as a location for the practice of aesthetics, a place where the population can try out different styles, identities and cultures. When Ziehe discusses “cultural drift” he does so on the basis of an historical comparison. While the 1970s, and what Ziehe calls “the first modernisation”, to a large extent was a period devoted to informalisation from the socio-moral perspective (in terms of freedom/lack of freedom), the “second modernisation” (the present day) is all about aesthetics and informalisation in terms of style/ lack of style. Ziehe links the concept of aesthetics to a learning process in which adults and young people together cultivate their environment (Ziehe, 1998). It is a process whereby different perspectives are brought into confrontation with each other. The aim is to surprise, to shock. What is at stake is acceptance or rejection. For those students who live for the mirror in the way we have described, the solution may well not be homogenisation. That being said, we can imagine school providing a space shared on as equal terms and by as many students as possible, a forum where the question of identity can be discussed in terms of style and aesthetics. If this kind of space were available, perhaps Nastaran would dare to stand out from the wallpaper, perhaps Petter would be able to view himself as part of a rich whole rather than as someone who is unable to fit in. The hall of mirrors also has an ethical dimension, which is concerned with identifying the differences between, for example, friendship/dislike, love/hate, deceit/loyalty, and conflict/consensus. The concepts of “style” and “identity” thus accommodate both inner and outer; the mirrors reflect both body and deed. A school may be dominated by a particular music or clothes culture, and in the same way we can conceive that there are dominant norms governing the interpretation of for example friendship, solidarity and tolerance. In an observation-based study of children’s friendship Katarina Gustafson (1998) distinguishes between a collective ideal voice, which is shared by all children and which establishes what friendship and relationships should be like, and a personal strategy for how that voice is handled at the individual level. In her observations and interviews Gustafson saw how children at school are partly formed by, and are partly involved in forming, an attitude relating to how people should treat each other. She sees this as being linked to teachers’ efforts to provide their pupils with the foundation they need to become good citizens who respect the principles of democracy; but she also sees how at the same time the children are busy working, outside the classroom, on universal norms: “There is
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a norm which describes how an individual should act towards others if he/she wishes to be a good friend, and that norm is shared by all children, who regard it as something positive and desirable. Problems arise when an individual is unable or unwilling to act in accordance wth the collective voice” (pp 60 – 61, our italics). Gustafson’s point is that training in universal norms is a fairly clear feature of everyday life at school. The girls in Felicia’s intrigue came by themselves, one by one, to the realisation that they had acted wrongly; following on this realisation there came an apology, and the conflict was resolved – without the interference of adults or any other explicitly formulated norms. Gustafson’s reasoning on collectivity and individuality can also be exemplified if we look again at the school situation of Nastaran and Petter. Nastaran, for her part, can be said to be at one with the collectivity, without a voice of her own. Petter, on the other hand, has adopted a position outside the collectivity and is situated completely in his own self. Both of these students are yet to succeed in separating the collective from the personal, and as a result there is a risk that they will experience problems at school, since school by nature is both collective and individual18 .
Fragmentation A school class lives under the constant threat of fragmentation. The threat to the group stems partly from natural changes – for example, the end of term and splitting up of the class – but also from inner factors, depending on how well each group member is able to adapt to the group. The feeling of not really belonging at school is a recurring motif in the letters: there are what we call “cagebirds”, who are clearly in the wrong ecosystem; we have the “outsider in the village” for whom school’s codes are incomprehensible; there are also those who have grown to be “too big for their town” or “too old for their age”. It is school’s duty to create a room for all these students who are threatened by fragmentation, be it of physical or psychological origin. Among our correspondents Kalle can act as the representative of the cagebirds. His heart and thoughts are always somewhere else other than school. He writes: “Our first lesson today is English and I can’t wait until school’s finis- hed and I go to ice hockey practice.”
In another letter he says:
“Now it’s soon the end of term. Great! – there’s always so much to do in the summer, for example fishing, boating, water-skiing.”
18 This constant alternation between closeness and distance has been graphically described by Bateson as “The infinite dance of shifting coalitions”. (Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 1971, p 241).
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The same longing to be elsewhere is present in all the letters Kalle wrote over the three years for which the study ran. The ratio of text about free time to text about school in Kalle’s letters is roughly 90:10. Fatumeh (a girl from a non-European background) is a student for whom school has not progressed beyond being a roof over her head during the daytime. She is unable to find a way into school culture. She paints the following picture of a lesson in Civics:
“...’Our national defence consists of the following parts: military defence, which is made up of the army, the largest of the armed forces...’ The teacher’s name is Eskil, his words disappear inside my head. I start day-dreaming. ‘I’ve got to find some way of making school more fun, I’m not getting anything done, it’s all a mess, but it’s a short day today, yeah but what about tomorrow and the next day, Jesus they’re long, boring days, but it’s only two weeks to the Christmas holidays, brilliant, I just have to survive till then, then everything’ll be better.”
Lesson after lesson, it is as if Fatumeh is doing time, crossing off hour after hour, day after day and longing to be on the outside.
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“I sit at the end of the row, next to the window, and I start looking out as soon as I get tired of what we’re reading. It’s grey and dreary, I can see some students going to the newsagent’s, ’have they been let out for break already?’ It’s still lesson-time, but maybe they’ve got early lunch today, or maybe they’ve had a test and could go as soon as they’d finis- hed.”
In her inability to make herself au fait with school’s official activities Fatumeh fills her days with other things. She is the outsider in the village. Stina is the kind of student who grows very quickly. She grows apart from her parents:
“You can’t make your own decisions as long as you’re still living at home with your parents”.
She grows apart from her old friends:
“I Storfors you just had to put up with it, accept that it wasn’t possible to find anyone it was worthwhile hanging around with. You just had to be with the people who lived there”
(cf. Elin in Lukas Moodysson’s film ’Show me Love’). Stina has also put her old interests on the shelf – she has even switched study programme. She is always looking for new experiences, new adventure. And as if there was no end to it all, in her final letter she wrote:
“I’ll probably move to Seattle one of these days”. 19
How can one bring into the fold sheep who have already found new meadows to graze on? Vanja displays several signs of having grown out of her age. She writes about teenagers as almost a separate race, adopting a kind of adult perspective:
“I reckon it’s a bigger strain to go to school as a teenager than a lot of people think.”
She continues in the same style:
19 The sociologist Peter Waara, from Umeå in northern Sweden, has written a thesis on how this complex of problems makes itself felt in the life of young people from the Tornedal region, which straddles the land border between Sweden and Finland. In the case of the young people he writes about we can say that there is an obvious conflict between the cultural values expressed in formal education and the cultural values inherent in their everyday life: the signifcance accorded in the latter to the local environment, hunting and cloudberries is not given the same value in the former (1996).
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“Younger and younger kids are starting to drink, and something has to be done to stop it”,
and often takes on the role of interpreter and explainer of adults’ experience:
“It’s specially important when you’re a teenager that there’s someone who can put you right when you take a wrong step.”
Finally, she attempts to place school on an equal footing with the adult world:
“Maybe we could have lunch later, and eat at the same time as business- men and other sensible people.”
In Vanja’s descriptions of the “good teacher” there is a vein of secret understan- ding, they express a sense of loyalty towards colleagues:
“One thing that feels good at school is when a teacher in a subject you feel a bit unsure in, or aren’t very good at, encourages you, and gives you support without letting it show – not out loud, because then you feel embarrassed because everyone can see you’re bad at that subject, but quietly, without being noticed.”
However, occasionally the adultness in Vanja’s letters is allowed to rest:
“But in spite of everything I miss school after a day or two if I’m off ill. I miss being with my friends, all the things you do together which you don’t do outside school.”
Non-Coherence of Time and Place Our use of the word fragmentation refers to disintegrative tendencies of both spatial and temporal nature. For Robin, life at school is sometimes too muddled and disorienting:
“Today we had some kind of pasta mixed with some kind of meat, but I didn’t have time to eat that much because they’ve changed the timetable and I didn’t know when lessons would start again or where we were supposed to go, because on some Thursdays we’re in the library after lunch but today we were going to the computer room, and before lunch it was PE but I didn’t have my kit with me because I thought it was going to be Dance, somebody told me it would be.”
Not knowing where you’re supposed to be and when is a sure sign of fragmentation,
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you are being exposed to non-coherence. And this leads to a fragmentation of your thoughts. The students’ letters sometimes contain cries for freedom. We called Kalle a “cagebird”, his interest is always directed towards something outside school, his constant wish is to be elsewhere than at school. And albeit Kalle is an extreme example, there are numerous other students whose concentration on occasions drifts away from school and focuses on their free time. Moa writes:
“If I think a lesson at school is boring I usually try to look interested even though I’m not, and then I can sit there thinking of what I’m going to do after school or at the weekend.”
“For the last quarter of an hour of a lesson all you can think about is when it’s break-time. As soon as the bell goes it’s a great feeling. Break- times are very social.”(Karl)
Filippa provides us with a third example:
“First Swedish, then English, and finally Maths. Always the same old story. In Swedish today we mostly went through stuff on the blackboard. When I’m sitting there staring at the horizon outside the window I slide into another world – Mmm, it’s not long till half-term and our skiing holiday in Norway.”
What these letters have in common is the inner ”flight to freedom” to which the students have recourse when school becomes too obtrusive or boring. In these cases the term fragmentation can be seen as describing the difficulty school has when competing for space in students’ “lifeworld”. Other students, such as Fatumeh, never really let school into their lives at all – perhaps because school has never really let them in. It is as if these students, in the absence of an “anchor”, are drifting off to a position where they can no longer be reached.
Nurds and Troublemakers Fragmentation and non-coherence are not just about the problems of navigating in time and space; social relations are also at issue. One frequently recurring theme is the inability to find someone at school to be together with.
“I think my class is pretty wimpy, since most people in it are nurds. There are maybe 5 or 6 who are normal, and then there are a few who are annoying and just talk all the time without the teacher doing anything about it.” (Robin)
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Bernard writes:
“I’m getting on OK but I haven’t got any real friends in my class, so I’m going to change.”
Johanna is also fairly happy at school, but she, too, has not been able to find any real friends in her class:
“I quite like my class, the other kids are nice, but none of them are the kind of friends I can tell everything to.”
Students are also at risk of losing the friends they have (see also the previous chapter):
“A while back I hated going to school. That was only because two of my friends started talking bad about me behind my back, and didn’t want to be with me any more.” (Cecilia)
Some students do not want to be together with their peers, but prefer instead to be by themselves.
“I’m not really like my friends – they want to be with friends after school almost every day while I prefer to be by myself with my computer, in my own home.” (Jens)
In a letter on the subject of break-times, Petter writes:
“We have a break every three lessons. Sometimes you spend break-time revising for a test, and sometimes you go around with a friend, and sometimes you go around by yourself, but I don’t mind that, I’m something of a lone wolf. When you’re with a friend you tend to talk about teachers, girls, etc. and when you’re by yourself you more or less think about the same things. That maybe sounds boring but it isn’t. Sometimes you bump into another friend who’s by himself, or maybe you meet a teacher who you can ask something about a test. But I think it’s better by myself, because I’m almost completely different from a lot of people in my class, there’s hardly anyone else who supports Arsenal apart from me, or who’s into the Stones.”
Self-chosen or not... Petter’s is the story of a solitary student walking around the school yard. There are a few students in our study who adopt a pronouncedly solitary stance; they don’t even attempt to seek out other students to be together with but seem to get more out of being alone. Frida writes:
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“For as long as I can remember I’ve wanted to be different”, and
“the feeling of being an outsider is something that appeals to me.”
Kajsa writes about her “differentness” as follows:
“I don’t often bother about ’social rules’ and I’m not interested in conforming with those unspoken rules about how you should behave. I know that I’m not anybody special, I’m a pretty boring nobody. But for exactly that reason I’m sure enough of myself, at least when I’m with my friends, to do what I want to.”
Being different is seldom acceptable. Certain of the students in the study have a tough time of it and are subjected to teasing or given the cold shoulder. Love wrote to us describing his situation at school:
“I’ve never had the world’s best self-confidence. But I have been really low. It happens quite a lot. In fact I’d say I feel low at least once a day at school. You get teased and that makes you sad. Sometimes when you’re tired of the lessons, for example if you’ve slept in and get to school late, so you get teased or maybe bullied, and then it’s Maths. A day like that feels like it lasts forever.”
Bullying also affects students who are not directly involved. Kajsa wrote about a girl who had changed schools and started in Kajsa’s class to escape being bullied at her old school:
“She’s really scared that we’re going to start bullying her too. As soon as she wants to do anything she asks me and my friends for permission. She asks if she can take the same bus as us, if she can sit next to us, she asks us if we mind it when she asks for help in class! Today she said sorry because she’d turned over some pages in my diary (after she’d asked for permission to look in it, of course). It’s starting to get on our nerves.”
Obviously there is no doubt as to whose predicament is the worst, but at the same time it is not particularly difficult to understand Kajsa’s reactions. She has to assume a fairly weighty responsibility for another person who has serious problems. When is anybody sufficiently equipped to cope with that?
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Too Big for This Town If asserting one’s own personality can be one reason why a person feels themself to be different, then the development of early or “precocious” maturity can be another. A number of students, most of them girls, feel themselves to be too big for their town or too old for their age. Stina and Vanja are just two examples. This feeling probably arises as a result of the students’ being on the border between childhood and the grown-up world, so that they do not feel really at home anywhere.
“I sometimes feel older than all the others, it’s hard and no-one understands it”,
writes Erika. A common feature in these letters is that the student regards his/ her classmates as childish (cf. the defensive attitude known as externalisation20 ):
“I haven’t got a typical childish boys’ sense of humour, like the other boys in my class. They’re always doing really childish things which are so silly they make me snort. They laugh at stupid things as well. I hope they grow up a bit soon.” (Jesper)
At the same time these students are not always accepted as equals by the adult world:
“Often when I feel down it’s because I feel that there’s no-one who listens to me. It’s like, no-one listens to me even though I do actually sometimes have something meaningful to say!” (Vanja)
At school it can prove wearing to feel older than one’s classmates – not only from the social point of view, but also in lessons. Sema, who is in year 6, writes:
“Our teacher reads aloud to us every Monday, and now he’s reading an Astrid Lindgren story (boring and babyish), and when I looked around I saw that nobody was listening.”
Other ways in which this situation finds expression include frustration at not being able to take responsibility for one’s own studies or life in general. Kalle writes:
“We’re not allowed to eat sweets or chew chewing gum in class. I think that’s stupid, I mean it’s not as if we’re eating them with the teachers’ teeth.”
20 By this is meant that a person projects thoughts or feelings beyond their own self – for example, ascribing to other people desires or personality traits which in reality are their own.
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Even if the ban on sweets in class is certainly concerned with other considerations in addition to the students’ dental health, Kalle, at the age of thirteen, thinks he is old enough to decide for himself when and where he eats his sweets.
The Multicultural Park The points discussed above under the heading “Fragmentation” have their origin in the heterogeneous nature of school, above all with regard to the differences prevailing among the students. However, teachers are also different, a fact which can have a great influence on whether the dominant forces move towards non-coherence or a spirit of cohesion and community. If a student cannot stand a particular teacher, that may have a deleterious effect on that student’s studies in that teacher’s subject. In the next chapter we will be looking in greater depth at the role teachers play in the learning process, but what Fatumeh has to say applies just as well in the present context:
“I remember right at the start of year 7, we had a Maths teacher who I didn’t like at all. I really hated that teacher, it was terrible because I never spoke to him. Even when I got stuck on a question I wouldn’t ask him for help. I didn’t want his help, I asked my friends instead. It’s still like that, if there’s a teacher I don’t like I don’t talk to them and try to
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keep out of their way – I don’t mean skiving off, but I try to get noticed as little as possible.”
The students we have discussed here arouse a number of questions. How can one get a student like Kalle to leave his cage; how can we enable him to experience joy at school? How can we tempt a student to join the school community and stop considering school as merely a shelter for the day – how can we help students like Fatumeh to crack the code and gain access to school culture? In other words, how can we make school roomy and flexible enough to accommodate all the individuality, differentness and personality which the students and teachers embody? One possible way of approaching these questions is by means of the metaphor of the “multicultural park”. In a study of common values at school and in society Hans Ingvar Roth (1999) uses the metaphor in the following way: “The park, like society, is a vulnerable collective entity, the continuing existence and development of which requires the different groups to work together. In contrast to the other frequently-employed metaphors in debate concerning the multicultural society – such as mosaic, salad bowl, kaleidoscope – the park represents a microcosm in which different people’s interests need to be co- ordinated with each other” (p 41). The analogy with a park also spotlights the importance of practical participation in forging a group identity. Roth says that visitors to the “park” are required to involve themselves in one or more of the activities which take place in the park if they want to be seen as belonging there. In the same way, the citizens of a multicultural society need to have the opportunity of identifying with one or more of the cultures represented in that society, if they are to be able to feel at home there. We can take the example of Stina to illustrate how the metaphor of the multicultural park can be applied to the theme of fragmentation. Stina is the archetype of a rootless student – she was born and brought up in Sweden, but her desire to get away is similar to the longing to go home displayed by certain students from an immigrant background. Vanja illustrates a similar problematic situation, but in this case with regard to age and degree of maturity. This leads us on to one of the central questions underlying our study: What real opportunities are open to students with differing cultural backgrounds, both national and international, to find in the school world a response to their identity, somewhere and some way to belong?
Lighting Our use of the metaphor of lighting in this section relates to the atmosphere or spirit prevailing in school. Even though the correspondence contains a large number of accounts which depict school as nothing but a dreary grey fog, there
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is nevertheless always light just around the corner, at any moment the sun might manage to break through. At school, the lighting is for the most part provided by the teacher and the group, but on occasions a classmate or best friend makes an appearance as “mood regulator”.
Of all our correspondents, Kajsa is the student for whom it is most important that the atmosphere is propitious. She is full of praise for Art lessons because the mood is so free:
“There’s always music on and it’s never hard to relax and feel creative.”
She asks herself why she likes Biology:
“Maybe it’s because I have a nice teacher who seems to be really interested in what he’s teaching us.”
In another letter she writes:
“There are a lot of subjects which the teachers could make much more fun if they could only get the students to be as active as they themselves are.”
In reaction to a photograph of a teacher taking a class (see Research Report) Kajsa writes:
“The teacher is sitting on a desk, and to me that detail means he’s a good teacher. That’s a way of getting closer to the class, he comes “down” to their level, communicates with them. That lesson is a light lesson, as opposed to a heavy lesson.”
The moment the sun goes behind the clouds Kajsa loses all her desire to learn:
“If the teacher just shouts and complains, and doesn’t trust you, you feel sadder and angrier than you do after a couple of bad tests.”
In Erika’s case the sun is lodged behind a bank of cloud; her letters tell of mountains of problems. She’s upset at losing a close relative, sad because her boyfriend has finished with her, and displeased at having done badly in her tests. It is important to her that school is a positive place to be – and often it is the small things which lead the sun to peep out. At one point in one of her letters, Erika lists things which make her happy:
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“If I’ve done well in a test, or if a teacher has praised my work. When I find out that someone thinks I’m good-looking, or good at something, or a nice person. If you find out that someone you like, likes you too.”
She also writes about “good class spirit”, when everyone talks and laughs together and enjoys the group’s company. None of this can be generated by an administrative process. School as a “positive place” is the sum of a large number of delicate signals: when these are floating in the atmosphere school can have a healing effect; when they are absent the pain can be unbearable. Looking at the material as a whole we can discern a number of clear patterns with regard to what it is in the students’ everyday school-lives that creates a good atmosphere, harmony, the right kind of good-natured mood. These patterns revolve around teachers’ personality and attitude, support from friends, and the attitudes prevalent in the group. Further factors of major importance are various rituals, ceremonies and events.
Präzens Those traits which are most prominent in the students’ descriptions of what makes a good teacher are commitment, awareness and a personal diction – qualities which in German are summed up by the word “Präzens”21 (literally, presence). The teachers who “shed light” in the students’ accounts are those who genuinely give the class something of themselves through their teaching. Robin writes:
“Everyone sits still and listens in her History lessons, because when she tells you something she does it with feeling.”
Wilma formulates the same thing in a different way:
“It’s important that he/she enjoys what they’re doing. You can tell which teachers aren’t really interested in what they’re teaching. A good teacher has to be committed, they have to think it’s fun being a teacher and really want to be there and give the lessons.”
Emma has similar ideas:
“At the moment, for example, we’ve got an excellent teacher in Swedish. He’s committed and the way he cares for us is brilliant.”
21 The German actress Hanna Schygulla was renowned for the “sense of absolute presence” (Präzens) she brought to her roles in Wim Wenders’ “Falsche Bewegung” and Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s films “The Marriage of Eva Braun” and “Effi Briest”.
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The impression one gains from what the students have to say is that a good teacher is one who is prepared to go “above and beyond the call of duty” and do something more for his students; another factor is whether or not a teacher can surprise their students with the unexpected. Filippa writes:
“Otherwise he’s pretty good, because his lessons are full of all kinds of interesting facts, so it’s easy to make associations.”
Ola has a similar episode to relate:
“One lesson I remember was a Humanities lesson a year ago. The teacher started the lesson by throwing French coins to us in the classroom. He asked us to read what was written on them. The lesson wasn’t only good because he threw coins out to us, but also because he got us really interested.”
In Destan’s case, the slightly surprising action of a teacher led to the most memorable event of the whole school year:
“He said he wanted me to take over the lesson and show the others what I knew, what the basic rules of football are. That was really something unusual, and helped me feel good. It boosted my self-confidence and made it into a memorable day.”
In the teacher’s role as provider of the right kind of lighting, ensuring that the little details are not forgotten is an important part – such as making an effort to learn the students’ names, having new books laid out ready on the students’ desks, rearranging the decor of the classroom in an unusual fashion, or showing recognition of the fact that a student has made a special effort. The students’ letters express very clearly the fact that there is a strong connection between what the teacher is like and what they think of the subject. This is how Emma puts it:
“I’m actually not very good at Civics, but my teacher’s brilliant, and she’s really nice as well, so I like going to the lessons anyway.”
Moa waxes lyrical about one of her teachers:
“I’ve met a really, really good teacher. You always look forward to that kind of teacher’s lessons, however tired you feel.” “My Swedish teacher’s really nice so his lessons are usually fun”, writes Robert. “What makes a subject interesting is how the teacher puts it across. A class where everyone is interested and involved is one
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where the teacher is strong and really talks to the class. It doesn’t matter then if the subject isn’t interesting in itself, you listen all the same.”
However, as often as the teachers appear in the role of creators of a good atmosphere, just as often they play the part of atmosphere destroyers, mood manglers. Kajsa writes:
“A teacher who makes the lessons uninteresting is the kind of teacher who always seems to be more or less indifferent, who can’t work up any enthusiasm and can’t get the class interested in what they’re doing, who doesn’t smile much, who just isn’t enthusiastic about it all.”
On the subject of the dichotomous character of the teaching staff Frida has this to say:
“Last year we had a Swedish teacher who everyone thought was great. The atmosphere in his lessons was excellent. I think that what made him so good was that he himself was very committed and involved. There was an aura about him when he stood at the blackboard, and his body language showed how interested he was and made you feel involved. It made the lessons fun. Some teachers almost seem scared of us students, they don’t dare to show any personal sides of themselves, it’s as if they don’t want to let us know who they really are. Lessons taken by that kind of teacher are doomed to be boring.”
A lack of involvement, the inability to find the right tone – teachers who “babble”,“mumble”, “go on”, “preach”, “reel things off” – and cynicism are recurrent descriptive terms in those letters which portray teachers in a negative light. The following quote shows that what these attributes are all concerned with is the ability, or inability, to create a positive and pleasurable learning climate:
“Down to the lockers, chuck the books in my bag into my locker, get out my Science books. The teacher is notorious /.../ He goes on about hydroelectricity, draws stuff on the board and goes on and on, not a change in the pitch of his voice. It really sends you to sleep, it’s hard to keep my eyes open. His monotonous voice merges with the humming of the ventilation fan, a distant buzzing you try not to let disturb you. I can’t hear a thing, even though everyone in the class is sitting still and quiet. Everyone’s just staring ahead of them, or at the clock. After 80 minutes we’re free again.” (Stina)
The teacher has an important role to play as a “lighting technician” in school.
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The letters also make it clear that fellow students are an important factor in influencing how that light falls and is reflected.
Light and Shade In the chapter entitled “The Hall of Mirrors” we saw how friends and classmates functioned as providers of personal and private support (“pocket mirrors”), a function which is of major importance in affecting students’ well-being. While a best friend may function as a “lighting technician”, this is usually only for a short while and is a source of lighting which is complementary to or contrasts with the illumination provided by the teacher and the group. Classmates, the “group”, seem to have a greater effect on lighting than do individual friends. When the students write about their classmates or schoolmates they tend to do so in general and somewhat casual terms, with closer friends being excepted from this broad brush-stroke; a “classmate” is a more diffuse component of the collectivity, and sets the “basic level” of the lighting in the students’ letters. You cannot choose the other members of your class, and often there are several people in your class who you do not like – you are in the hands of forces you cannot do very much to control.
“Thursday, it’s Spanish first and as usual it’s noisy, but what can I do about it? I can’t stand up and shout at the whole class to be quiet, can I?” writes Saskia. These forces continue to be active outside lesson times:
“Break-times vary a lot. If class 7D are in the corridor at the same time as our class, 7C, then there’s no peace for anyone, I can tell you, because all the boys have to prove how tough they are. And if the ninth formers happen to come along at the same time, then they get even rowdier”,
Saskia writes in another letter. In a letter for which those of our correspondents who were set to start at upper secondary school were asked to write about what they remembered best from their years at junior and lower/middle secondary school, Frida responded in tones reminiscent of George Orwell’s “Animal Farm”:
“From the very first lesson I noticed there was something different, something strange about this class. You never heard anyone laughing out loud, you never saw anyone smiling, no-one even gave me any kind of welcome when I joined the class and was new. It was like that for four years, the intrigues grew and grew, all the new students who joined
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the class were bullied, everyone was mean to everyone else! I never really got to feel like a member of the class, and I think that’s because I never went along with their rules – their rules which made sure that none of the others in the class could enjoy school and that everyone felt really messed up.”
Our material also contains considerably brighter descriptions of the class group; these occasions occur almost exclusively when school has done something specifically in the aim of fostering team spirit and a sense of community – such as end-of-term celebrations, class trips/camp schools, school concerts, class study visits, group projects, and so on. Karl, for example, has the following to say:
“It’s actually fun to have an end-of-term celebration where everyone joins in, it makes you feel like a group of people who belong together. Some of my friends who go to other schools don’t have a proper end of term, they just all go to their classroom, say goodbye, get their reports and then go home.”
Another student, Cecilia, writes:
“I used to think my class were noisy and not very nice, but now I’ve got to know them a bit better and I really get on well with them. I feel at home in my class, when maybe 10 or 12 of us sit together talking, joking and listening to music, like we did on the class trip to Backe.”
“A Good Enough Teacher” What the students’ letters have to say about the teachers as “providers of lighting” has a lot in common with Woods’ descriptions of the “ideal teacher”: “For pupils in general the most important attributes of good teachers are that they should be ‘human’, should be able to ‘teach’ and make you ‘work’, and keep control. They should also ‘respect’ pupils if they wish the respect to be returned. This respect has to be earned – it is not an automatic right” (Woods, 1990, p 17). The English psychoanalyst Donald W. Winnicot talks about the “Good enough mother”. A good enough mother is neither too much nor too little. Similarly, it seems reasonable to talk about the “good enough teacher”; this is a teacher who shows empathy from the correct distance – close enough to care, not so close as to encroach on students’ private domain. This balance is not always struck; Felicia, in one letter, tells in great detail about a “girls’ intrigue” during a lunch break. After a good deal of anger and tears the girls sort their differences out – but
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“then, of course, our teacher has to go and poke her nose in, try to get things straight, as she says.”
The tyranny of good intentions! At the same time, the “good enough teacher” has to be able to look beyond the students’ horison and offer them new perspectives. Vanja wrote to us full of enthusiasm for her favourite teacher:
“In German we’ve translated passages from Selma Lagerlöf’s speech when she won the Nobel Prize for Literature. We’ve even been given bits from the bible to translate!” (Compare with Ziehe’s concepts of decentralising and well-dosed strangenesses).22
The atmosphere prevailing between students in the class serves as something of a “sounding board” for the teacher’s teaching. A good climate among the students provides teachers with a firm platform for their teaching; and we have also seen how teachers by their own efforts can lift the atmosphere in the class. Frida’s account above of the class where nobody smiles is a pregnant description of a school class in which the degree of freedom has been severely curtailed. The room for manoeuvre available to the students, both as individuals and in their inter-relationships, is almost non-existent – nobody “could enjoy school and everyone felt really messed up.” One means of increasing flexibility within the system, as Cecilia intimates in the letter quoted above, is to open the system – in her case this was achieved by means of a class trip, but the same result can be achieved in a simpler fashion, for example through a school concert. What is required is simply to create “different” experiences which can be shared by all; the effect of these is to offer the class a new “frame”23 within which new
22 In the text “Good Enough Strangeness in Education” Ziehe exemplifies what he means by “strangeness” and “decentralising” in this context. He writes: “I know some desperate teachers who even try to teach the middle ages by dissolving the middle ages as a strange object completely into the horizon of the kids today. In the end, middle ages is like the village today. The good way would be, and I can only put out a try because I do not know better; either the subject is underdeterminated, meaning that we don’t say anything, we leave some holes to it, we leave some openness in it. Or it’s overdetermined, meaning that we give some special points to it. We intensify it. I give you an example: I used to give classes in modern dance, so I’m a bit familiar with body-work. Now, if you take the identity discourse, you come up to the kids and you say, ’OK, all of you like dancing, so let’s do the following: I give you good loud music, and you try to dance the way you feel’. Now, what comes out of this is that each kid is reproducing their own bodily stereotypes in a very short time. After three minutes everyone has a stereotype movement, and they reproduce them. They might even like it, because they’re dancing the way they’re used to dance. If you overdeterminate it you introduce some strangeness. You ask each kid to make a circle with a chalk around their left foot and now they are not allowed to leave the circle with the left foot. The kids would ask you: ‘Why?’ You say: ‘I don’t know, just do it.’ And they do it. Believe me, they invent new movements. They come away from stereotypes. They dance in a different way. Although it is definitely very artificial, ridiculous thing not to be allowed to leave the circle. What you get out of it is that I’m polemising against a didactical realism in saying let’s be natural and let’s not be artificial. It’s the other way around. I suggest school should be artificial, school should be different from realities, school should be surprising.” (Our italics. Ziehe, 1995, in Aittola et al. p 25 f). 23 In his book “Change – Principles of Problem Formation and Problem Resolution” Watzlawick puts forward the following definition of reframing: “Reframing thus consists of replacing the conceptual and emotional frame within which one experiences and judges a particular state of affairs with a new frame which is as well suited, or even better suited, to the ‘facts’ in the situation and thus brings about a change in the whole signification of that situation”. (p 106, Watzlawick 1974)
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kinds of freedom of manoeuvre are enabled to develop24 . Existing frames of reference, loyalties and friendships are reassessed, and opportunities are created for the development of new relationships. As new variation “flows” into the system the spirit and atmosphere of the group are also changed – sometimes in quite dramatic ways. When the class subsequently returns to its “old” environment the students find that they have a new range of possible courses of action, and that maintaining the old rules has become uninteresting and unnecessary. That being said, this kind of change cannot be steered and controlled in every detail – a class is far too complex a social system for this to be possible; instead, with a gentle hand the teacher is able to vary the “atmospheric frame” enveloping the class and thus provide the students with extended scope for manoeuvre. The system will then change itself in response to the new degrees of freedom prevailing, and all at once a new class spirit has been created.
Drug Trade The metaphor of a “drug trade” relates to school’s system of rewards, assessment, bonuses and praise – and how vulnerable and unprotected students are vis-à-vis these phenomena. The use of the word drug is especially appropriate in this context since drugs, like the rewards school dispenses, work by “over- determination” – in other words, they fill many needs and functions simultaneou- sly. School’s rewards are easily available, they boost students’ self-confidence, and provide a measure of value, both intellectual and physical. In addition, they are dispensed intermittently, like a win on the lottery. Their effect is especially powerful in “high-stake” situations when there are major repercussions for the future, and when the student’s identity and ego are weak or in a state of temporary fragility. The letters contain numerous examples of students who have become entangled in these nets of rewards and reciprocations. We have read of the intoxicating joy that can be released by a good test result, but have also witnessed the total loss of self-esteem that can follow on a series of poor test performances. School’s apparatus of rewards and assessments also impinges in a very concrete fashion on friendships, activities outside school hours, and harmony in the home. School’s (legalised) trade in rewards and assessments can launch careers and success stories, but it can also knock young people off- balance at a sensitive point in their lives.
24 This can be compared with the study of decision-making processes relating to students’ working environment which Jan-Olof Hellsten carried out within the framework of his licentiate dissertation “Combating Chaos”. Hellsten shows that changes in students’ working environment are made more in response to school’s fear of what it sees as disorder than in response to what is really needed. The consequence of this is that decisions are taken to implement sanctioning systems which reduce the students’ room for manoeuvre. This in turn leads to a failure to change students’ behaviour, and a failure to create a propitious working environment. Cf. Watzlawick’s expression “more of the same”, which he uses when looking at situations where the very solution constitutes the problem.
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Of all our correspondents, Yaminna appears to be the one with the highest level of “drug-addiction”. We might define her as an obsessive swotter:
“I put big demands on myself. I know that I can cope with it all as long as I have the support of my parents and teachers.”
Grades and test results are the stars by which Yaminna steers her life:
“I sat the test and got all the answers right. I felt so happy, I was top of the class and got a 5. I deserved it after all the work I put in.”
(The grading system in Swedish schools has recently been reformed; in the old system, students were graded on an ascending scale running from 1 – 5, with 5 being the highest grade; in the new system the grades are Non-Pass, Pass, Merit and Distinction, with Distinction being the highest grade).
At one point one gets the impression that the whole of her very existence is at stake:
“I used to revise myself to death when we had a test coming up, and then I would spend up to two hours actually doing the test, so I was there until late in the afternoon. It was a real slog!! But when the tests were over it was a great feeling, and I used to bike or walk home thinking about all kinds of other things. I was usually completely worn out! That’s what I’ll always remember from my time at middle secondary.”
The first letter Yaminna wrote after starting at upper secondary school contained the following passage:
“The main thing I’m thinking about at the moment is whether I can reach my aim of leaving upper secondary with the highest grades.”
She even views her involvement in our project, “Students as Partners in Re- search”, in the light of a rung on her career ladder:
“I hope there’ll be a report or some kind of result at the end of it. Perhaps also something to show that we were involved in the project over the three years. It would be something to be proud about.”
Bernad’s attitude towards the school drug trade is a different one. While Yaminna is working hard in the aim of achieving the high targets she has set herself for the future, Bernad is fully occupied in using what school has to offer to bolster his ego in the here and now:
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“I’m a member of the Student Council and the Parent-Teacher-Student Association. I’m also the school’s student welfare officer. And that’s not all – I also look after the keys to the quiet room, the football room and the girls’ room.”
In Bernad’s world grades are a currency which can be exchanged for prestige and status:
“Once I forgot my pen and the teacher lent me one because I’m her pet, although she doesn’t usually lend pens to other students. Mind you, I deserve it.”
Neither is Bernad slow to utilise school’s fringe benefits :
That sent my self-confidence up by 90%.”
Jonas also notes:
“Swedish is an important subject. Getting a Distinction in Swedish is worth more than a Distinction in German.”
Finally, he wishes
“to thank the curriculum for the fine set of seven Distinctions I got in my report.”
Jonas’ unquestioning acceptance of school’s role of judge and assessor is made almost over-explicit in the following passage:
“I hate my physical attributes, and take all the better care of my mental ones. Who needs muscles when they’ve got a brain.”
Jonas has internalised school’s system of rewards until it is almost a part of his physical constitution – it is as if he has ingested too much school. It is clear that test results, grades and special privileges are important identity markers for Yaminna, Bernad and Jonas; and while this is especially strongly the case with regard to these three students, dependency on and an obsession with results and grades is a feature which runs through all the correspondence. There are two clear areas of motivation steering what the students have to say on these subjects: their self- esteem, and the way they view knowledge. Both of them have obvious dysfunctional effects.
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Highs and Lows The students’ obsession with results has a yoyo-like impact on their self-image – they’re up one day, down the next:
“Once I made a terrible mess of a Maths test. I got 4 out of 27. I felt I was useless and just wanted to go home and bawl my eyes out, but I had to carry on through the rest of the day. But when I got home after school a couple of tears fell”,
writes Lina in one of her letters. In a later letter, the same Lina writes:
“When a test or piece of homework gets handed back and it says ’Merit’ on it, it makes the whole of that day much better, everything just goes smoother somehow.”
This way of writing about the effects of test results and marks is very common in the letters. A number of students formulated their feelings in a similar fashion. A good test result can make a whole day and leave a student ’on cloud nine’, while a poor result shatters their self-esteem and they ”just want to go home and cry”25 .
Kajsa writes:
“If you ask what makes me feel I’m clever or pleased with what I’ve done (and what makes me sad and unhappy), then the first thing I think about is pretty obviously school, and grades and tests. School, and the tests and marks that get dished out there, are the cause of most ’Oh-I’m- so-useless’ and ’Wow-I’m-really-good’ feelings.”
Another example is provided in a letter from Max:
“School can make you happy, but it seems to me that it more often makes you feel down. Specially near the end of term, when all the teachers panic and start giving you loads of tests. Being given your marks can also change the kind of mood you’re in: it makes you either happy or sad and angry.”
In certain texts we can clearly see that a test result is more than merely a gauge of performance in relation to a number of set questions. A test result has a tangible effect on a student’s actions and attitudes to those around them. This is what Erika has to say:
25 Månsson and Hamerin conduct a similar discussion of how grades can deal blows to students’ self- esteem, in the chapter “The Consequences of Grade Competition, 1. Sensitive Self-Esteem.” (”Det lönsamma läsandet” [“Profitable Study”], 1976, pp 15 – 25).
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“There have been a few times when I’ve had good test results when I’ve felt a bit ashamed to say what mark I got. But it can also happen that you think you’re going to get a really good mark and in the end get a very low mark, and then you feel really disappointed and depressed. You feel you’re absolutely useless and you don’t want to tell anyone what your result was. It usually makes me sulky for the rest of the lesson. Or I look for things in the test where I can complain to the others and say they should actually have been marked right (although I know that they are in fact wrong!!).”
This quote clearly illustrates how Erika finds herself in a quandary as to whether or not she should reveal her marks to her classmates. She also sits and sulks, or complains and tries to find fault with the marking of the test – which, we can assume, affects her ability to follow what is being taught in that lesson. Some letters describe tests and grades as if they were tools with which teachers wield power. In one of her letters, Frida writes:
“I know teachers are ordinary people, but they have a lot of power, and a huge responsibility. They’re not exactly people it’s a good idea to get on the wrong side of. I understand that it’s up to us to make sure we learn something, but it isn’t what we know that’s important later on, it’s the grades we get at school. The teachers give the grades, there’s no getting away from that fact, they hold our future in their hands.”
This perception of teachers’ assessments as an expression of power to pass judgement leads students to deploy a certain amount of cunning in their dealings with teachers. Students develop strategies aiming to avoid getting onto teachers’ “wrong side”. Frida even seems to be saying that it is more important to keep in teachers’ good books than to acquire knowledge! Whether students reap success at school or find themselves condemned to constant failure is a major factor in determining their “school identity”. We described Yaminna as an “obsessive swotter”. In certain cases students can define their identity themselves, but in other cases a student is assigned an epithet by the other members of the class. Bernad writes:
“Of course everyone knows who are ’swotters’ and who are ’skivers’. If you’re a ’swotter’ it’s not usually easy to be any good at sport.”
Elin provides us with another example:
“Some people you can tell by looking at them that they’re swotters, if I can call them that. They dress in posh, expensive clothes. /.../ Other people you just know they’re swotters. Some people feel ashamed that they
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have an average grade of over 4.0, or that they get nearly all the answers right in tests.”
(The strategy whereby students consciously “play low cards” in order not to make too clever an impression is examined in the section “The Strategists”.) A “swotter identity” may however also provide protection against other, less desirable identities. Ylva writes:
“I’m quite well liked, which is probably because of my breasts and the way I dress (I’m a nice person as well). But that doesn’t mean I’m a stupid bimbo! My average grade is 3.7.”
The material also contains a number of accounts of how a “receipt” proving that a student has performed well has filled a constructive function. These cases generally concern situations where a teacher has given a student personal praise, and this has made the student feel a bit unique, chosen. Kajsa writes:
“A few days before I’d handed in my first essay to our Civics teacher, and it felt a bit like a test. At break-time she came up to me and said it was a very good essay, that I’d done it exactly how she wanted. I was really pleased she said that, of course. When I got the essay back she had written on it that it was good, but didn’t say it in the same way. Right at the start of the term it was exactly what I needed!”
For Lina praise is important; it gives her the courage to claim her share of the class’s shared “talking space”. She says:
“Or if I get asked a question and for once I know the answer and the teacher praises me. That makes you happy, and you dare to answer another time. If you answer wrong, I at least don’t dare to put my hand up another time.”
However, praise has to be sincere:
“It makes me happy to be given praise, honest praise. If you get praise which is just for the sake of giving praise it has the opposite effect. And anyway, that kind of praise is easy to see through”,
writes Ola, indicating that praise can function like a trading commodity without any value. We mentioned above that we had identified two areas of motivation underlying what the students wrote about tests, marks and praise: one of these was their self-esteem and identity, their self-image; and the other was their view of knowledge. It is probably the case that these two areas should not be seen as
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being isolated from each other; they seem rather to be interconnected and partially have their roots in the manoeuvring surrounding the situations in school in which assessments, judgements, are handed out.
Decimal Fetichism The occasions on which the students wrote about what they had actually learnt at school can be counted on the fingers of one hand – at the same time as the correspondence is filled with information about the exact marks achieved and grades awarded. This fact in itself speaks volumes about the understanding school conveys with regard to what knowledge is – a view of learning which to a large extent is about using results and achievements as instruments for competing, without any reference to context and meaning. Jesper informs us proudly:
“If you give me 60 numbers in a row on a piece of paper, I can learn them by heart in an hour”, but he makes no mention of what he might use this knowledge for. In Jesper’s world knowledge is something you compete with (and for). Several of our correspondents write about test results and grades in the same way as they write about sporting competitions – they prepare, get into the starting blocks in a nervous frame of mind, the signal goes and they run as fast as they can, reach the finishing line and are given a time and a ranking. Bernad writes:
“Just think – in my worst subject, English, I got 101.5 out of 120. Seventh in the class, and there are 25 of us in the class. In the other tests I was either 2nd or 3rd in the class.”
We have seen above that Bernad’s focus is very much directed towards academic success at school, so this quote is typical for him. Another student, Peter, who in contrast to Bernad is not particularly interested in school per se, writes:
“Another thing that’s fun is when I beat a boy in my class called Mats Hansson, because me and him are about the same in quite a lot of subjects.”
The terminology of competing is very clearly a feature of this passage – “beat” and “about the same” – and is evidence of a view in which knowledge can be measured in absolute units. What is the qualitative difference between someone who gets 101.5 in a test and someone who gets, for example, 103? Perhaps Karl has the answer:
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“The thing everyone’s thinking about most at the moment is how good they are compared to everyone else in the class”26 .
Competing with/for the “decimal points of knowledge” sometimes stands explicitly in the way of learning. Johanna writes:
”I think a lot about finishing quickly. If any of my friends finish before me I feel really stressed, and that means I can’t concentrate.”
Once a student has internalised the code of using knowledge as a means of competing with their peers, it can prove very hard for them to see what true “learning” or “education” actually is. Destan writes about a test in Child Care Studies, where the maximum mark was 85:
“I got 82, so I knew that I’d improved my average grade since my mark meant a 5. It was my first ever 5, as well. You could say I’ve become a child care specialist.”
In Destan’s book, it is the grade 5 in itself which indicates that he is a child care expert. The quote is taken from the second letter Destan wrote to us, and in his subsequent letters he never again mentions his “specialist area”. Destan clearly demonstrates that it was the top grade that was the aim he wished to achieve; the knowledge in the subject was of completely subordinate importance.
Trial by Ordeal The students’ letters show that in their world, test results and overall assessment grades are inextricably interlinked:
“I was hoping to get a 5 in Civics, but unfortunately I didn’t have enough time to prepare for the test” (Destan);
“If I’ve got a 4 so far in a subject and we’re going to have a test, I revise really hard so that I get a four in the test, then I know that I’ll get a 4 for that subject overall” (Max);
and
“The result (in a diagnostic test) showed that I was bottom of the whole class, and because of that I only got a 2 in French” (Peter).
26 Derek Downtree discusses the subject of competing with school results in his book “Assessing Students – How do we know them?” (1977) in the Chapter ”The Side-Effects of Assessment”, p 54ff.
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The overall impression gained from the correspondence as a whole is that the students have very little understanding of the principles underlying the awarding of grades. This lack of clarity gives birth to fables and mythological superstition – and in the worst scenario, a deep suspicion towards the whole system. Lina writes:
“Why should the grade you get depend on which teacher you have? I was in the same class as a friend of mine in year 9, we were equally good at everything, we both got 5s in almost every subject. When we compare our essays now they’re about the same as each other, but her teacher gives her higher grades than mine gives me. And two of my friends handed in the same book criticism to different teachers. The friend who’s on the Economics programme got a Merit, while the girl on the Hotel and Catering programme only got a Pass. I think that’s a bit strange.”
The fact that there is insufficient dialogue at school concerning the bases on which grades are awarded was brought out especially clearly in connection with the introduction of the new grading system, which occurred in the second year of our study (instead of the old system of numerical grades, in which 1 was the lowest and 5 the highest, the new system of assessment awards grades on an ascending scale running Non-Pass, Pass, Merit, Distinction). Saskia writes:
“Getting a Merit is a big joke, and especially Distinction. Distinction’s like getting a 7 in the old system.”
Other students were worried as to how they could work out their overall average grade, or said they preferred the finer calibrations of the numerical grades (in the old system students’ overall average grades were expressed to one decimal place) since it was easier to compare their own grades against their classmates’. There is also, as we have touched upon above, a widespread belief among students that they are awarded grades for orderliness and good behaviour. Sometimes it’s more important to be quiet than to do good work if you want a good grade. Lina writes:
“A lot of people say that my grade in Geography is only because I’m quiet and sit still and smile, and that is probably part of the reason. Teachers pay too much attention to what you’re like as a person, and that’s completely WRONG.”
Bernad believes there is an inversely proportionate relationship between talkativeness and high grades: “I’d like to get better grades, but sometimes when the lessons get boring I
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start talking. I’ve been trying to control myself and it seems to be working. I can tell that because the teachers have got a bit more respect for me now.”
Our study shows that there is uncertainty among students about the purpose of grading and the relationship between grades and learning. Grades and test results are often made into instruments with which students compete with one another, and are not seen to have any connection with the content of the subject matter in question. Against this background the question that arises is, To what extent is a dialogue carried on in schools relating to education/learning and the assessment of knowledge, and are the students included in this dialogue27 . Surely it is better to hear a student exclaim”At last, I understand Algebra!” rather than “I’ve got a higher grade in Maths!” If there is no such dialogue there is a major risk that school’s jurisdictional prerogatives will be all-embracing, and that students will internalise grades and assessments to such a complete extent that they become interwoven elements of their own identity (as in the cases of Yaminna, Bernad and Jonas). Thomas Ziehe (1998) warns us of the consequences of the fact that teaching staff to an ever-increasing extent are asked to assess not only students’ level of knowledge in the academic subjects, but also all other aspects of the students’ development. He maintains that authorising teachers to discharge such moralistic and therapeutic functions leads to the pedagogical process becoming totalitarian, and he pleads for awareness of the desirability of moving in the opposite direction. His standpoint is that students have the right to protection against further expansion of the “pedagogical calculation”, however well-intentioned it is. Students are entitled to a certain degree of opacity in their student world, they have a right to assessment-free zones in their everyday life at school. The whole of a person should not be presented to the teacher as the object of his educational practice, and students are entitled to show both commitment to and non-acceptance of the realities of life at school. We might talk about the right not to succeed. In this context Ziehe says that numerical grades are easier to keep at a distance than assessments expressed in words; numerical grades provide a degree of protection as a result of their abstraction. However, there is a negative side to this abstraction, in that it entails a large gap between knowledge and the form in which that knowledge is appraised – it is in such a situation that students talk of their knowledge in terms of decimal fractions or Passes and Merits.
27 In the framework of a study entitled the “98 Project” students and teachers were interviewed on the subjects of power and democracy, and one of the areas looked at was the grading system. The report says: “In exactly the same way as the students, teachers also feel that they do not have a clear and comprehensible grading system. In addition, they feel that the system is often unkind and produces unfortunate consequences – a frenzied drive to get high grades, a division of students into succeeders and failers, negative effects on self-esteem. In other words grades, this real instrument of power in the hands of both teachers and students, are more than anything a necessary evil. The grading system is moreover an uncontrollable tool, and neither does it have any value or importance in the distribution of power and responsibility at school.” (p 270 in first draft of Swedish edition, 21.12 1998)
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The Strategists When our correspondents write about school they make markedly frequent use of expressions such as “surviving”, “trying to make it through [the day/lesson etc]”, trying to “bear it”, things which “drag on” or are “boring”, etc. These approaches to describing school indicate that the students let themselves be “subjected to school”, or, to use Habermas’ terminology, that the system (i.e. in our case, school) has been allowed to invade and obliterate their lifeworld1 . Using our terminology we might understand the students’ expressions as metonyms (i.e. parts which illuminate the whole) for what, at the beginning of the book, we termed the “School World”. Is what we see in these expressions of trying to “survive”, of students suffering their way through the school day, perhaps a “victim’s position”, the result of students being steered by forces beyond themselves, and rendered unable to deal with the conditions in which they find themselves? Is this how you express yourself when you have internalised the student’s role – describing yourself as helpless, in the hands of forces you cannot control? However that may be, this is a reflection of the fundamentally “complementary” nature of the relationship between school and students: one gives, the other receives, one teaches and the other learns. One is in a “superior” position and the other is in a “subordinate” position, in the sense that one criticises and the other accepts the criticism, one gives advice and the other follows that advice, and so on (see also Watzlawick, 1967). In the themes we have dealt with so far school has been discussed within the framework of the complementary student-school relationship, which is the predominant one. This means that the students are viewed solely in the light of recipients, while the burden of responsibility for effecting change rests with school. We can for example look at the theme we called Fragmentation, where
1 In his classic work “The Theory of Communicative Action” Habermas uses the concepts of “lifeworld” and ”system” to describe communication and actions in modern society. In effect these concepts have their origins in Weber’s terminology and his theories relating to the rational society; in Weber’s work “system” denotes the domain in which formal rationality is operative, while ”lifeworld” is the place where a more “real” rationality manifests itself. In Habermas’ terminology the lifeworld is a sphere in which one can observe communicative action: “The lifeworld is, so to speak, the transcendental site where speaker and hearer meet, where they reciprocally raise claims that their utterances fit the world... and where they can criticise and confirm those validity claims, settle their disagreements, and arrive at agreements.” (p 126) Continuing his description, he says that the lifeworld is “a context-forming background of processes of reaching understanding” via communicative action (p 204). This understanding revolves around the lifeworld’s three elements – culture, society and personality – and forms the basis of the individual’s actions, his/her subjective perspective on every situation in which he/she finds themself. The system, on the other hand, involves an external perspective on society, “from the observer’s perspective of someone not involved” (p 117). The elements of the lifeworld (culture, society, personality) have corresponding elements in the system world: cultural reproduction, social integration and personality formation. In other words system and lifeworld are in a dialectical relationship to each other, their influence on each other works in both directions. Communicative action within these structures (lifeworld and system) is becoming increasingly rational in modern society. Beneath this rationalisation process, however, the tendency is for the system to exert an ever stronger direction-determining force over the lifeworld; and this, to put it simply, leads to an impoverishment of the individual’s ability to communicate in the aim of seeking understanding and consensus. If this is to be avoided, maintains Habermas, a greater degree of mutual exchange bewteen system and lifeworld must be brought about.
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Kalle, Fatumeh, Stina and Vanja are discussed as recipients of various measures instigated by school – in other words the viewpoint adopted is, what does school need to do for these students to be able to “fit in”. In this section we will shift the focus, and place the students’ strategies centre-stage. Our material includes a number of students who we can call “strategists”. These students appear to be freer than their peers; their relationship to school is based on equality or near-equality. In other words, they have a “symmetrical” relationship with school. This is not to say that this kind of relationship is necessarily harmonious, but it is a relationship in which the terms are more equal than in the case of the complementary relationship described above. Take Max, for example. He is the student who has the abiity to grow in a vacuum:
“I think it’s a good thing if you find it easy to make friends or if you’re good at a sport or hobby, because then you have good self-confidence and if you fail a test you don’t feel as bad about it, because you know you can win self-confidence through your friends or when you’re playing your sport.”
Max’ strategy is to exchange a failure in one area for a success in another area:
“I think music is an escape route for a lot of students. For example, if things aren’t going well at school, when you get home you can listen to music and not have to worry about reality”;
or “Football is very important to me, and if my football’s going well I feel happier and have more self-confidence.”
This “exchange strategy” is particularly effective as a tool in coping with school:
“Often when I wake up I think of all the boring subjects and don’t want to go to school, but because we’ve got PE I end up going to school anyway.”
Johanna is another example of a good “strategist”. One constantly present trait in all Johanna’s letters is her optimism and ability to see the bright side of life. Problems tend to sort themselves out, that’s what Johanna reckons:
“But recently, if I’ve been aching somewhere or if there’s something else I don’t like, I’ve started to think: ‘it’ll soon be over, this is only now but things’ll be better later on, when it’s over.’ And when I think that it doesn’t feel so bad. It actually does help, and I can cope better.”
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Johanna has the ability to see nuances, and to discriminate between what is good and what is bad:
“There are three people in our class who are quite a lot worse than the rest of us. I don’t think you usually notice it, but we do actually talk about it sometimes. Not that it bothers me at all, they’re nice people all the same.”
A further example:
“There aren’t any absolutely boring subjects, but Swedish can be pretty boring. It’s good fun writing stories, but spelling and things like that aren’t much fun.”
By looking forwards and always emphasising the positive aspects of any situation Johanna succeeds in coping with what at times is a grim school reality. Frida’s strategy is to act as director of her own thoughts and actions. Frida thinks life is to be enjoyed and likes to take things at an easy pace, but at times she endeavours to overcome her “lazy” attitude, and “grasp the bull by the horns” and push herself into activity:
“I think the real reason I decided to be a class representative was to make myself concentrate more at school. If you’ve got plenty to do you’re more or less forced to be organised and plan your time well, and that means you have better discipline with homework and things like that.”
However, there is a delicate balance to be struck here:
“Another situation which makes me feel not so happy with myself or with other people is when I feel that I have lots of things going on and don’t get anything done. Situations like that make me feel completely stressed. It’s the same if I’ve got too many things to do at home. I think what you have to do is find a kind of balance between having too much to do and not having enough.”
Frida has also developed a number of personal rituals which help her deal with her feelings. She writes:
“One way I have of getting rid of negative feelings is with water. It’s best to go swimming in the sea, but if that’s not possible the shower will do. You can’t cry when you’re under water. I swim under the water and can see this landscape which, because of the water in my eyes, is hazy and like in a fairy tale. Everything is so beautiful that it’s impossible to
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feel sad. The feeling of being surrounded by water is enormously comforting, you feel safe and completely alone.”
The strategy Frida describes here shows certain similarites with primal therapy and its use of concepts such as the foetal stage and primal screaming (Janov, 1970). What Frida says here provides an interesting demonstration of how a person’s imagination can be placed in the service of their mental well-being. What Max, Johanna and Frida have in common is that they have successful ways of working with their interpretations of reality. One can say that the way in which one thinks about reality becomes reality in its consequences (this is what is known as the Thomas theorem2 ). Felicia differs somewhat from Max, Johanna and Frida – she can be said to be the architect of her own fortune. Of all the 46 students in our project Felicia is the one who provides the clearest expression of independence and uncompromisable integrity in the face of the capriciousness, inconsistency and “clumsinesses” she encounters at school. Having “painted” a caricatural portrait of five of her teachers she writes
“But some teachers are like that, that’s what makes school fun. How would we manage to get through our lessons if we didn’t have our nutty teachers to look at?”
Felicia’s natural integrity is prominent in all her relations with the people around her. She is the only student in our study who openly declares that she does not like her best friends’ taste in music. She refuses to make it up with the boy who finished with her – despite the fact that she still has strong feelings for him and he wants her back. When her friend is in a sulky mood she says ”it’s more fun to walk around by yourself than to be with a sulky moaner.” Similarly, when looking to the future Felicia displays considerable independence:
“My dream is a career as an archaeologist or biologist. That may sound funny for a 13-year-old, but I don’t dream of being a rock star or a model.”
Felcia’s path through school will probably be lined with a fair amount of conflict and collision, but of all our correspondents, she seems to be the one with the greatest courage to go her own way. She is, for example, the absolute opposite of Nastaran (see the section on “The Hall of Mirrors”). The descriptions of Max, Johanna, Frida and Felicia bring to mind the research that has been done on “micropolitical strategies” in the disciplines of educational science and organisation theory. Research on micropolitics has its
2 After William I. Thomas, one of the best-known representatives of the “Chicago School” of American sociology. Robert K. Merton illustrates the Thomas theorem by referring to the bank crash of 1932: rumour led to many savers believing that there was a crisis in the banking system, so they withdrew their money and thereby triggered a real bank crisis which developed into the crash.
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origins in criticism directed against traditional organisation theory; the critics maintained that traditional theory did not take account of differences at the individual level with regard to the interpretation and understanding of different organisational systems. Micropolitics can be explained in terms of the means by which different individuals attempt to achieve their objectives and desires – means which sometimes conform with the aims and rules of their organisation, and sometimes do not. Joseph Blase writes that “Micropolitics is about power and how people use it to influence others and to protect themselves. It is about conflict and how people compete with each other to get what they want” (Blase, 1991, p 1). Blase has analysed the research that has been carried out into micropolitics in school; he points out that most of the work done has revolved around the political reactions of teachers and school managers, and that the studies have primarily been concerned with open conflicts (see also Ball, 1987; 1993; Hoyle, 1986). Less research effort has been put into studying micropolitical processes in the framework of different co-operative relationships. If one moreover wishes to read studies of micropolitical processes which focus on student-student and student-school relations, one will find that the amount of research that has been conducted is very scanty. The few studies that have been carried out into school-students’ micropolitical strategies have frequently taken as their basis Hirschman’s (1970) concepts of exit, voice and loyalty (see Andersson et al. 1994; Ball, 1993; Berg, Englund & Lindblad, 1995; Forsberg, 1992; Jonsson, 1995; Lindblad & Perés Prieto, 1997). A (Swedish) project called “Young People’s Life Projects and School as an Arena” (see Jonsson, op.cit. for an account of the project) studied how these strategies are expressed at school; the concepts were defined in the study as follows (in Andersson et al. op.cit.): “Loyalty is the alternative which has traditionally been available to students. Various types of student influence fall within the frame of the voice strategy, while exit can be viewed in terms of playing truant or changing to another school” (p 19). When we describe Max, Johanna, Frida and Felicia as strategists we are not saying whether they use exit or voice strategies in order to affect their life at school or achieve their dreams. However, in their case we could talk about “independent power”, or the ability in different situations to identify the right strategy for reaching the immediate objectives they have set themselves. As far as strategists at school as we have defined them are concerned, the aim is not to influence a finished product, but rather to influence processes in such a way that they seem to further one’s own personal development. If we consider the ability to identify the right strategy for reaching the immediate objectives one has set oneself in different situations, then in most students’ letters there are passages which suggest that this ability is not the unique preserve of the students we have singled out as being good “strategists”; what separates the strategists from the other students is that they constantly apply a strategic attitude to the environment they find themselves in, while the other students manage to do so from time to time.
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When the students write about strategies, their texts are concerned with the attitude to adopt towards their environment/school within the framework of an (apparently) loyal mode of behaviour. They are concerned with how to survive and tolerate a boring everyday existence, how to manipulate and trick the people around them, how to avoid people they don’t like, and how to actively work with experiences – all of which has as its aim the satisfaction of personal objectives or desires. Viewed this way, the concept of “strategies” becomes something more subtle than a question of “student influence” and “truancy” – it is a matter of demonstrating independent power.
The Art of Surviving a Day at School When the students write about lessons it is not unusual that they describe them in terms of boredom. Expressions such as “the clock hardly seemed to move and everyone was yawning all the time” and “60 minutes of suffering are over” are examples of this. The reasons for the ennui can vary – sometimes a teacher a student personally does not like, sometimes it is the teaching method used, sometimes the subject itself. It can also be the result of what kind of “form” the student feels themself to be in on a particular day, or the time of day at which the lesson takes place. The phenomenon of boredom can of course be understood in a number of different ways, but ultimately it is concerned with a kind of temporal socialisation (cf. Persson, 1991; 1994; Westlund, 1996) whereby the child, who lives in his/her “circular time” – everything is now, everything is immediate, everything is here – is forced to adapt and conform to school’s “linear time”, in which everything is organised in accordance with a previously determined timetable. The students’ accounts point to a conflict between their own time and school’s time – and this is a trial of strength which school nearly always wins. At the same time, students develop strategies for recapturing fragments of the time that has been taken away from them. The strategies students describe in this respect are concerned with simple artifices such as dreaming they are elsewhere, thinking of something else, living for the subjects they find fun, making sure they turn up late, passing notes to one another, talking to friends, secretly reading comics, or steering the official classroom conversation into time-consuming side-tracks. We might call these “survival strategies”. Sema writes:
“The best (trick) when I’m in a class with a boring teacher is that instead of listening to the teacher I think, and when I really get deep in my thoughts I can’t hear anybody else.”
Another girl, Filippa, writes:
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“The trick we use most to make the time pass more quickly in boring lessons is passing notes around. I know it sounds childish and imma- ture, but it does really work. Obviously, you need to have a few friends in the classroom to send notes to, so that you can get answers. These small letters (though small maybe isn’t the right word – they can often be as long as both sides of an A4) are usually about fun things that have happened or will be happening, or about how unbearably boring Maths is, or whatever subject we happen to be having.”
The success of this kind of survival strategy can be gauged in terms of two criteria – successful implementation of the strategy (i.e. avoiding detection):
“When you turn up late it’s important to look stressed, so that it looks like you’ve done all you can to get there in time even though you really haven’t hurried at all” (Peter); and doing something that can lead to other gains:
“If you know it’s going to be a boring lesson you can make sure you sit right at the back or behind one of the tall boys – that way, you can do some homework without the teacher realising” (Lena) or
“When the Humanities lessons get boring I usually flick through the Humanities textbook till I find something interesting to look at” (Love).
Truancy (exit), to take one example, can in this light be seen as a strategy that is both successful and destructive – in two ways: when playing truant you may avoid being found out, but at the same time you missed a chance of learning something; at the same time, perhaps you will be found out, but you made good use of the time until then to revise for a test in another subject. Although the material collected for our study does not enable us to discuss any connections between successful strategies and variables such as gender, social class and ethnicity, we can nevertheless, as does Lindblad (1992) assume that they do play a part. Lindblad maintains that we have to understand students’ use of strategies in the light of the “life careers” they have in mind or for which they are “predestined”. We have previously described Yaminna as an obsessive swotter; if we view her strategy of one-sided, total concentration on school-work from a life-career perspective, we might define it as a desire to free herself from a culturally determined restrictive role for women (it can be pointed out here that she comes from a non-European background). From this point of view she is certainly well on the way to achieving success – but at what cost, and what other
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alternatives might be open to her? Of additional interest here are Sahlström’s analyses of student-student interactions, which demonstrate how the specific context affects the success of a strategy (and its implementer) (see for example Sahlström 1998a; 1998b; Sahlström & Lindblad, 1998). Among the factors which can have a decisive effect on a strategy’s success are who you sit next to in the classroom, which other students are competing to be heard, and so on. We can for instance assume that it is necessary for the general noise level in the class to be low, if a student wishes to talk to a friend in the back row without being told off by the teacher.
Sussing out the System We have already mentioned that certain survival strategies can prove to be more successful than others. But the students’ letters also contain descriptions of strategies whose objective is success in itself; the aim of these strategies is to manipulate and deceive the teacher into believing that you are better at the subject, or as a person, than is really the case. What is required is the ability to adapt, to act, to go along with the teacher, or to swallow your pride, all in the name of avoiding ending up in the teacher’s “bad books”. A basic requirement if you wish to succeed at this is that you can see through your teacher, that you can ”suss out” what they want of their students and what kind of character they have.
Frida has this to say:
“There are different types of teachers, and different ways of dealing with the different types:
• The old-fashioned, strict teacher: - likes it when students try hard - doesn’t like creeps Method: make a serious, hard-working impression. Be sure not to be bad- mannered, but also make sure you’re not too nice.
• The ‘mother-hen’ kind of teacher: - likes well-behaved students who do their work and don’t play up - doesn’t like it if students are lazy Method: make sure you’re nice and polite, don’t make too much noise. Show that you care and want to do well, but that you also need the teacher’s help.
• The ‘matey’ kind of teacher: - likes students who laugh at their jokes, likes it when students dare to speak their mind and put forward their own opinions
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- doesn’t like personal insults or anything else that wrecks the matey atmosphere Method: be yourself, most things work well on this type.
• The nervous teacher: - likes it when the lesson finishes - doesn’t like students who ask questions or do anything else to make teaching more “difficult”. Method: don’t ask any questions! If they ask you give clear answers. Nod and look happy.
• The modern teacher: - likes alternative learning and study methods - doesn’t like misunderstandings Method: make sure the pieces of work you hand in are unusual and ‘far-out’. Show that you dare to reach your own conclusions.”
These portraits have something of the exaggeration of satire. but they nevertheless provide a pretty good idea of students’ ability to “suss out” their teachers and adapt their actions to this intelligence. Another student, Ylva, elucidates further:
“Analysing what the teachers are like is pretty good fun. The way they react when someone plays up, or talks too much, or whatever, shows you their style and gives you an idea of the best way to act in their lessons.”3
One recurring theme touched on in the letters is the question of the tactics adopted when putting your hand up. The basic principle is to respond quickly to the questions to which you know the answer; once that has been achieved you can “safely” put your hand up on questions for which you don’t know the answer. The students believe that if they do this, the teacher will think that they know much more than is actually the case. Destan writes:
”The trick I use most is to put my hand up on every question. It’s most likely then that I won’t have to answer all the questions, because teachers usually point to whoever looks most uncertain.”
3 In Kjell Johansson’s novel “The Face of Gogol” (in Swedish “Gogols ansikte”) there is a brief episode which demonstrates how inventive children can be when working to gain an advantage by carefully studying the people around them. “One day something happened which partly changed my situation. There was a boy in my class called Alexander Danilevskij. We’d been in the same class ever since Poltava. Danilevskij was a nice, rather unimaginative boy who seldom defied anyone. Another of the boys in my class was called Konstantin Bazili. He came from Greece, his family had fled their homeland to escape the Turks. One day I was walking over the school yard with Danilevskij. I suddenly started talking like Bazili, imitating his foreign accent. Danilevskij laughed till he cried. I thought about this. The next day I plucked up courage and went to find Bazili; when I found him I started imitating Danilevskij, with his thoughtful voice and cautious gestures. Bazili howled with laughter. By chance I had discovered a skill I would be able to make good use of. Lessons no longer felt completely meaningless. I studied systematically – not the subjects, but the teachers and my fellow pupils. And what I studied wasn’t what they said, but how they said it.” (p 53 in Swedish version).
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A further example on the same theme:
“Something that a lot of us do is only to do the part of the homework which we know the teacher is most interested in. Then, in class, you put your hand up on the questions you know the answer to, and make sure you catch the teacher’s eye so that he asks you once or twice. Once you’ve answered once or twice it’s unlikely that he’ll ask you many more, since he has to ask the others in the class questions as well. So you can put your hand up on questions you’re not sure about and avoid catching the teacher’s eye.” (Vanja).
The letters also contain examples of more “sophisticated” methods. Robin, who in his letters likes to put himself across as being self-confident and “tough”, writes:
“It isn’t hard to trick teachers into thinking you’ve done the homework, all you have to do is sit next to a couple of shy swotters, they always tend to whisper the answer to each other, so then you put your hand up and answer the question. That’s all there is to it.”
Why do the students find it so important to give the appearance of knowing more than they actually do, or of being more interested than they really are? Strategies such as “pretending to take loads of notes, and looking dead interested” (Ola) can be understood in the light of what we considered in the chapter entitled “Drug Trade”, above – the need for confirmation, recognition; and the internalisation of an atomistic view of knowledge. But equally, what may be involved here is the conflict between the desire to do well at school, and the disinclination to sacrifice all of one’s spare time. Kajsa writes:
“Putting the various bits of homework in an order of priority is [the strategy] I use most. You have to do that if you don’t want to spend the whole of every afternoon doing homework, and who wants to do that? I know exactly which bits of homework I can do less carefully without it being noticed, and I know which teachers check if you’ve done the homework in which ways. It’s a ‘survival method’ you learn.”
There are also, it can be added for the sake of balance, certain students who “keep a grip” on themselves, and put the objective of long-term success first – they consciously choose to ignore the temptations of the moment under their nose, in the aim of achieving good results at school. These students have no thought of manipulating or finding short cuts to help them through the school day. Frida writes:
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“School work can be like a positive spiral. Once you get round to sitting down and doing all your homework and things like that, you get new energy from the work you’ve already done. It’s the same with things that don’t have anything to do with school. I think it’s because otherwise you build up unconscious stress which makes you more and more passive because you don’t know where to start.”
We can see Fatumeh, who we know from the chapter “Fragmentation”, trying to find a way into the school community by “pulling her socks up”:
“But now I’ve got to change my attitude. I’m worried that it’ll turn out just like in year 7, when I just took everything for granted. I’ve got to work seriously at the subjects I’m not so good at.”
Evasive Action In the chapter entitled “The Hall of Mirrors” we looked at how students work to find their own personal style, their own identity. We looked at the collectivity, and the latent demands it places on the individual. Several of the students’ letters describe strategies for surviving the collectivity; these strategies can be concerned with steering clear of people they don’t like, and thus avoiding conflict, or with concealing traits which do not conform to the group norm. Yaminna writes:
“There are two girls in my school who I don’t really like, so I try to stay clear of the corridor where they usually hang out. If I ever find myself right in front of them I make myself busy with something so that I don’t have to say hello or talk to them.”
Another possibility is to give the appearance of being busy:
“If you see someone who gets on your nerves I have a very simple trick: look extremely busy, talk frantically to someone, frown deeply while concentrating on a Maths textbook, etc.” (Jesper).
However, it is not possible to avoid completely the people you don’t like. Once you find yourself in a face-to-face situation with such a person, you have to apply other kinds of strategy. Felicia wrote about what she does when she ”bumps into” someone she doesn’t want to talk to:
“If they come up to me I usually lie and say I’m on my way to a lesson. The problem is, they usually stay and start talking anyway, which really gets on my nerves. Then you just have to say to them, ‘Sorry, I can’t
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face talking to you any more’. You have to make it sound like a joke and laugh when you say it; then you repeat that you’re late for a lesson and rush off.”
A number of the students wrote to us about the problematical side of being good at school. In certain contexts, being good at school can be interpreted as an infringement of the tacit rule that you have to “hate school”. Disparaging nicknames such as “swotter”, “creep” or “teacher’s pet” are used to designate those who ”break the law”, and for students who are in the danger zone one expedient is dissimulate their academic prowess by “playing low cards”:
“I usually pretend not to know anything. I say “I think” after I say an answer, so it sounds like I’m guessing because I don’t know anything” (Bernad);
or by turning the other cheek:
“Some people call me swotter. I don’t like it (I don’t suppose anyone does) but I just try to be nice to everyone” (Johanna).
Swotter, creep, teacher’s pet – these are expressions, or judgements, which are typical of the school world and are applied to those who, to put it simply, ally themselves with the enemy: in other words, with the teacher. Those who wish to succeed academically at school, in a school community where one of the dictates is not to like school, have to find a “strategy of the middle way”, a strategy which requires them to exercise a special kind of adroitness.
Surrogate Strategies The letters contain numerous testimonies to how individuals find strategies which enable them to create balance and meaning in their inner life4 . One strategy they frequently adopt is to work through their experiences – for example, using music or sports in a conscious attempt to regulate their frame of mind5 . Other methods inlcude the application of positive thinking, rewarding
4 Cf. Perry’s (1970) research into the development of thought. He maintains that the way young people understand the world develops in a sequence which contains the following “positions”: 1), one way of viewing the world; 2), several ways of viewing the world; 3), a scientific way of viewing the world; and 4) a relativistic way of viewing the world. The quotes in this section show how the students move towards the later positions by separating themselves out of the collectivity as an individual person with a voice of their own. 5 In his novel About a Boy, Nick Hornby writes: “Will loved Nirvana [...] All that rage and pain and self- hatred! Will got a bit...fed up sometimes, but he couldn’t pretend it was anything stronger than that. So now he used loud angry rock music as a replacement for real feelings, rather than as an expression of them, and he didn’t even mind very much. What good were real feelings anyway?”
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oneself and praising one’s own achievements, or accepting challenges. Kajsa writes about music as “therapy”:
“Music is good company and inspires me. Music can make you cheerful, or amazingly happy and wide awake, but it can also make you sad or thoughtful. /.../ I reckon there’s hardly anything better than listening to some good music if for example you’re feeling a bit down. You start dancing, tapping your foot in time with the rhythm, singing along. Your whole body fills up with music, and you start feeling as happy and positive as the music! Music manipulates your feelings at least as much as a good film can.”
To give another example:
“I mostly listen to punk, stuff like Nirvana and Red Hot Chili Pepers. But at the moment I’m listening to almost nothing else but ballads, because my boyfriend’s finished with me and it’s good music for when you’re depressed” (Erika).
Frida’s strategy of controlling her feelings by using water (see above) is a further example on the same theme. “Switch” strategies or endeavouring to see things in a relative light function as counter-strategies for limiting the negative feelings caused by poor grades or test results. The wounds of disappointment cannot perhaps be avoided altoget- her, but they can be prevented from smarting too much:
“If you get a ’Fail’ in a Maths test, you feel stupid and a bit depressed. But that kind of thing doesn’t really make me depressed, you soon feel like normal again when you see all the others who’ve got a Fail, and then you think of how much easier you find other subjects.” (Stina)
”Sometimes I’ve done really badly in a test (only in English), and then I feel really disappointed with myself, but then I try to think that there are 80 other students at school who are worse than me.” (Bernad)
We made the acquaintance of Bernad in the chapter called “Drug Trade”; this quote shows how strategies can also be adapted to serve the requirements of different personal microcosms. Another strategy is when students decide to “stand on their own two feet” to see how strong their own identity is when removed from the influence of friends. Felicia has illustrated the implementation of this strategy above, but other students have also described the same process:
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“My self-confidence has improved in another way. Before, when I played with my best friend I tried to act and be like her. But then I realised that that wouldn’t get me anywhere, and I stopped trying to be like her.” (Sanna)
Individual Sovereignty In this chapter we have focused on the students’ own strategies for dealing with the reality in which they find themselves. These young people display a marked skill at gaining and retaining control of their personal life situation – a kind of control we can call “individual sovereignty”. Individual sovereignty can be defined as the successful deployment of power resources (Korpi, 1985; Lundahl, 1998), or unique qualities and abilities which every individual has at their disposal and which can be “activated” in relations with other people. The constant objective of this sovereignty is to satisfy, in one way or another, one’s own preferences. The demonstration of individual sovereignty can frequently have the appearance of constant intriguing and manoeuvring – we could perhaps liken it to a game of chess, in which both players deploy finely calibrated strategies in the endeavour to outmanoeuvre each other. In certain situations you might be obliged to sacrifice a pawn (take one step back) in order at a later stage to take a queen (go two steps forward). Each piece has its specific characteristics (power resources): the queen has a large range and a wide domain; the king has a limited range but a large degree of centrality, and so on. Moving a piece always entails a certain degree of risk – some moves involve a large amount of risk, other moves are much less hazardous. Every move, or series of moves, across the chess-board is about the exercise of power, the result of which is wholly or partially dependent on which pieces one’s opponent still has and how he/she deploys them. Our findings also clearly show that some strategies are better in the long- term, other strategies are related more to the immediate present, while other strategies can have a positively devastating effect. At the same time, the question arises as to whether this ”individual sovereignty” is the only kind of power students possess. An additional important question is whether it is self-evident, in other words functions in the same way as in ordinary social life, or whether it is the result of an “unhealthy” system. Within the framework of the study known as the “98 Project” (see footnote 27 above) which investigated the subjects of power and democracy at school, it was found that neither students nor teachers have formal power. There is a double or mutual powerlessness at school, with teachers and students feeling themselves to be placed in a process they are unable to control – and yet both groups project the power they feel themselves bereft of onto the other. The students interviewed saw the teachers as having power – teachers decide, they are
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not co-operative, they give out marks and grades, they are unjust and autocratic. For their part, the teachers did not project as much power onto the students, but on a more abstract level the students represented a mass over which they, the teachers, had no power/control; low motivation, poor academic performance and bad behaviour all become too much to cope with. According to the study the result is that a “them-against-us” feeling develops, the two groups become adversaries although they are both basically in the same boat. If both teachers and students are lacking in formal power, then personal power, what we in this section have called “individual sovereignty”, gains in importance for the individual’s ability to make it through the system. The findings of our study show that in this respect students have a high degree of competence. That being said, this is not necessarily an exclusively good thing: in the chapter The Hall of Mirrors we mentioned the risk that students who are unable to find or create for themselves a position in the official school world, or – as the case may be – to trick and manipulate their teachers, will turn instead to that world’s unilluminated backyards and alleyways in order to settle up matters of power and status there.
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PART 3 A Good Enough School
The subtitle of this book, “A study of life at school, and school’s role in life”, suggests a kind of double vision: the study of “life at school” is concerned with the daily socialisation and identity processes in which young people are engaged, and with their quest for meaning; and the study of “school’s role in life” is about how school accommodates the young people in this continuous work. The analysis which we have woven on this twin thread casts light on a number of school’s archetypical features. In our discussion of the Hall of Mirrors (the collectivity), Fragmentation (heterogeneity), Lighting (climate/atmosphere) and the Drug Trade (tests and assessments) we have been struck by the wealth of identities and plans for life to which school needs to give space. In our small sample of 46 students alone there are children and near-adults, poor people and rich people, Swedes and Puerto Ricans, swotters and skivers, timid mice and troublemakers, clowns and princesses, punk-rockers and hip-hoppers, pianists and football players, animal lovers and hunters, and so on. To all of these we must add all the different personalities of the teachers; Frida characterised some of them above: the strict, old-fashioned teacher, the mother-hen kind of teacher, the matey teacher, the nervous type, the modern teacher. At the same time we were equally struck by the similarity of form, the stability and repetition displayed by school as a system. Students wait for the bus, get their books out of their lockers, walk along the corridors, the bell goes, they have English and Maths, there are tests and checks to see if they’ve done their homework, the bell goes, lunch, Home Economics and P.E... “Every day at school was like the others, when you look back you can’t distinguish one from another. /.../ The succession of days was like an endless, grey line, they drove past you and you yourself remained in the same spot, you stood absolutely still and watched them drive past, and there was nothing you could do about it.” (Hoeg, 1996).
Two questions present themselves:
How is it possible to accommodate all this variation in a system that is characterised by such uniformity and stability?
Or is it rather the case that school’s rigid and repetitive features are in
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fact functional, and even indispensable if it is to be possible to steer a steady course towards the objectives established for school education?
In our attempt to work towards an answer to these questions – questions of critical importance for all of the school world – we have chosen as our guide the expression “a good enough school”. The aim of such a school is to create a learning environment which could be characterised as an intensive and interes- ting normality. The aim is not to smooth out every wrinkle and reduce the amount of variation, our philosophy is not one of an unoffensive middle-of-the- roadness. The qualities we think a good enough school should embody are “flexibility combined with even pacing”, “awareness”, “rhythm” and “balance”. We can illustrate what these qualities imply by looking at a study undertaken in a completely different sphere – Maja-Lisa Perby, in her book about the work of process technicians in the paper-pulp industry (Perby, 1995), describes certain phenomena which are of direct relevance to the questions we posed above. “ ‘There’s no skill involved in keeping it straight’, Jonas said at a work seminar. ’There are some instruments which trim a regulator too much, so that the display is just about a constant straight line. ‘But in the winter, sometimes the regulators freeze up in some of our plant, and then they show the same actual value all the time. And if the actual value is just a straight line all the time then you don’t get any help to see if anything’s up with the regulator. There has to be some kind of life in the regulator, life in the transducer.’ At another point the technician says ‘You can’t use your skill if the oscillator’s up and down like a roller coaster. I mean it’s obvious – you can only use the delicate skills when the run’s going smoothly.’ Another technician, Claes, says that they get irritated by chopping and changing – ‘when the foremen come and change how many revs we’re supposed to do after only an hour. /.../ If they’d only leave us for a week without making us stop and start we could really put our best skills into action.’ ” The straight line, movements up and down like a roller coaster, chopping and changing – does this all sound familiar? Let us first take a look at “the straight line” from a school perspective. In the school context, this expression means that the work has got stuck, caught up in over-rigid structures. Our material contains large numbers of passages concerning this phenomenon, for example when the students complain about how deadly boring their school days are – there is no life, they’re getting the same “actual value” all the time:
“French could be so much more, but all we ever get is, go through the homework from the last lesson, go through a new chapter, get some new homework. Always the same! All the time! Christ it’s so boring!” (Filippa)
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On the other hand, we also received a lot of accounts of roller coaster “oscilla- tion”, situations where there was not enough of a straight line. A telling example is provided by Stina’s account of a school study trip to the sewage works and a couple of factories in her town:
“Having spent several lessons learning about these things in our books, we were now to go and ’experience’ them in the real world. Fair enough. The bus left on time from the school’s car-park, on a cold winter afternoon. All of our class was on the trip, plus one other class. First we drove to a factory, where there wasn’t enough room for us in the car- park so the bus pulled up in the street, from where we could see the tin roofs of the factory. We weren’t allowed to get off the bus, but our dear Science teacher told us all about the factory we could see through the window about 60 yards away. Nobody was listening, and some people got off the bus for a smoke, so after about a quarter of an hour he lost his thread and asked the driver to move on to the sewage works. ‘Shit, this is going to stink like hell’, my friend shouted out. Our teacher smiled when he heard this, since he’d taken care of that problem. ‘No need to worry’, he said, ‘we’ll be staying on the bus’. So we got to the sewage works with its low buildings of blue corrugated iron, and drove round and round it in the bus while the teacher explained what went on inside the works to treat the water. There was also an outdoor tank, which we could see a glimpse of. After that we drove to a place for cremating animals, we saw this red building as we drove past. Then at last we were allowed to get off the bus, at a rubber factory. Everyone stormed off the bus and into the factory, and the teacher found a bloke who was going to guide us. Unfortunately no-one could hear what he was saying for all the noise from the machines, but we understood his gestures when he told everyone to leave the building immediately. Someone in the class had been playing with his lighter, which was very dangerous. We were ordered to get back on the bus to go to our final destination – the rubbish tip. When we got there half of us headed straight for the nearest bus-stop to catch the first bus back in to town.”
The students’ descriptions of life at school also contain depictions of chopping and changing. Frida is steaming with resentment at all the new-fangled pedagogical ideas she is made to suffer:
“The result is that you don’t understand what it is we’re actually supposed to be doing. OK, we’re forced to think for ourselves and that’s a good thing, but only very few people in the class do that. Instead of everything we would have been able to get done in the lesson, everyone
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has to do the work by themselves, without a teacher to help them, at home./.../ It’s just about impossible to learn anything when you don’t know what there is to learn!”
Just as in the paper-pulp industry, it is important for schools to achieve a degree of “aesthetics” in their processes – in other words, to avoid the too-straight line, roller-coaster ups and downs and too much chopping and changing. This can be achieved by keeping an ever-observant eye on the processes in operation, and effecting small amendments and adjustments – not too much, not too little – in order to ensure that the work can proceed at the right kind of even pace. This requires a special kind of awareness, an alert presence in the process (Präzens); teachers need to be able to view things in their broader context, they need to be up-to-date and in the know, able to “read the game” (see the section entitled Lighting). This is exactly what we mean by “a good enough school”. If a school is to function well it needs to maintain a very delicate balance between variation and fixity. If school, with its wealth of interactions, does not have a “wall of constancies” there is a risk that it will be pulled into pieces from within6 . When, for example, teachers complain at all the educational reforms and sudden changes which are implemented in schools, and say that they need to be left in peace in order to get their work done, this may be an expression of their intuitively recognising the importance of maintaining certain constancies if school is to function properly. That being said, school also has to ensure that it avoids “the straight line” of too much uniformity if it is to be able to accommodate and incorporate all the variation that comes its way. It is above all important for school to avoid chopping and changing and the imposition of sudden, incomprehensible changes. Our material shows that it is this kind of change which risks crushing the most sensitive seedlings (cf. Robin in the chapter on Fragmentation), thus resulting in a school where only the strongest survive (cf. The Strategists). A metaphor for this can be found in Bateson’s description of the South Downs (the landscape of undulating chalk hills in southern England):
“When I was a boy I used to collect flowers and beetles there. The downs were covered with turf, the grass about an inch high, and in this grass there were thirty or forty different kinds of plant, and a corresponding number of insects, etcetera. There were little orchids, wonderful things like that. It was a bounteous hunting ground for me, a boy of twelve.
6 Ashby, supporting his arguments by referring to cybernetics, maintains that if any system is to function well and be able to deal with change, then there is a limit to how inter-linked the components making up the system can be. In a system with too high a level of interaction, what Ashby calls a “too richly cross-joined system”, certain components need to be able to rest temporarily – what Ashby refers to as a “wall of constancies” – if the system as a whole is to be able to carry out its work. In such systems, additional information can represent a direct threat to the continued existence of the whole system. Ashby, 1969, pp 208–210).
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The landscape was maintained by the sheep and rabbits which grazed on it. /.../ And then the motor car entered the system. It was too expensive to fence in the downs, and the sheep kept getting onto the roads. This annoyed the motorists, so that finally it was necessary to get rid of the sheep. That left the rabbits, who did a reasonable job for a few years. The rabbits were kept in check by the farmers, who took their evening walks with their shotgun over their shoulder. /.../ Now there are no rabbits there, and when I went to visit the South Downs four years ago the grass, which was previously an inch high, now measured a yard in height and the turf contained only five or so species – to wit, those species which could live in conditions of both short and long grass. There were a few trespasser plants as well – plants of the kind which can survive anything and thrive anywhere. You see, what happens is that the more often you make these kinds of sudden changes – and the emphasis is on the word ’sudden’ – then the more you fractionalise things down so that you only allow the most flexible to survive. In the final analysis, that means those plants we call weeds. The same applies with regard to human society. ” (Brand, 1974)
The concept of a good enough school refers, then, to both the aesthetic and the ethical duties which school has to fulfil. The political task school has to succeed in discharging is to function as a cement binding together high and low, large and small; there must be a place for people from all classes of society, all nationalities; boys must be able to interact with girls, history must be woven into the present and the future. For the young people of today nothing is new, nothing is strange. They are already living in the adult world even though they are still children: “I really like sitting and talking about things with my Mum or my teachers, but I also like being with my friends and just, like, being. It’s nice to be in-between being a child and an adult.” (Ylva)
They come to school full of unordered impressions and information, often “in top gear”, as Filippa can illustrate in the following quote:
“Something which is perhaps a bit extreme but which puts me in a good mood is going shopping, preferably for clothes, bags and shoes. I get a big buzz out of making up my mind, ‘I’ll take this one’, going up to the cash-desk, paying, and having the things packed in a bag. I often buy things I don’t need at all, and might only use once at the most.” Here school’s task of damping down, investigating and sorting things into order is especially important.
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Furthermore, we know from the findings of the national evaluation of education in Humanities that today’s school students have an insufficient understanding of time and space, i.e. of historical chronology and geography. In their answers there were students who thought that Gustav Vasa (the “founding father” of the modern Swedish nation and a contemporary of Henry VIII) lived in the time just before the First World War, and who thought Peking was somewhere close to Helsinki. This is probably an effect of the high level of media exposure and mobility which characterise our age – the world has shrunk in terms of both distance and time. Consequently, school’s work of establishing perspectives, is increasingly important in order to help the students develop a sense of reasonable proportion, and to illuminate context, the whole picture. Frida (quoted above) calls for school to provide clearer, firmer direction: not because she doesn’t know any better, but because in the cross currents of different study techniques there is a risk that her own navigation skills will not be sufficiently well developed to enable her to find the right course. If school cannot offer an “even keel”, a core of continuity by which it is possible to navigate, then there is a risk that Frida and other students like her will build up a resistance to and distrust of school. Distrust is what characterises the attitude towards school held by Fatumeh, who we met in the chapter on Fragmentation. While she is physically present at school, in her inner life she is somewhere completely different, anywhere but school. A good enough school would widen Fatumeh’s horizons, would go beyond being “a roof over her head” and offer her a richer context, would include her in a multi-textured whole. It is likely that this can best be achieved by following the principle of one small step at a time; with small means it is possible to bring about very slight and delicately calculated, yet significant, adjustments to the classroom climate. Kajsa, who we met on the theme of Lighting, writes about how positive it is to have a teacher who “often says ’Now this is something I think’s fun! It’s really interesting, isn’t it?’. Even if not everyone thinks it is all that interesting it makes such a difference.”
The good enough school also has to strike a balance between homogenisation and heterogeneity. Petter’s struggle with the opposing forces of outsiderhood and normality illustrate the need of ensuring that questions relating to identity are on the agenda. If school could clearly articulate its position as a place characterised by multi-facetedness, diversity, it could help Petter to feel that he is a representative of “rich normality”7 rather than a lone wolf or odd-ball who people whisper about behind his back. Bullying, and racism, are allowed to grow
7 At the Reggio Emilia Institute the concept of “Rich Normality” is used to explain what they mean by a balanced, harmonious whole. “This effect of intense and interesting normality is not generated by a monologic environment, but by the balanced combination of many different elements, just as the white light of the sun is the sum of all the colours of the spectrum. It is the poetics of bradyseism, of small effects on different scales.” (printed in bold in the original) Ceppi, G. & Zini, M. (eds), 1998.
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where questions concerning heterogeneity and homogeneity are not dealt with in the light of day but are instead shunted aside into the alleys and backyards of the school world. The reality of schools where there is not the right sense of balance, schools which are not good enough, is most clearly demonstrated in the traffic with tests, grades, marks and assessments. What occupies the students’ minds and arouses their interest is not the learning process, not the interaction between knowledge and personal development as such, but rather the figures, the decimal places. Emma writes:
“I knew in myself that I’d made a lot of progress during the term, but the confirmation that I’d done better than last term would be seeing it in black and white. My report showed that I’d improveed my grade to 4.9.”
The attitude expressed in this quote is the very antithesis to learning, to education. Instead of a figure, a number of points scored which only gives an illusory notion of knowledge, true learning, real education, is fundamentally about the fact that any one same item of knowledge is not universally valid for everyone in every context, and it should also convey an understanding of the fact that there are numerous cultural differences in the way reality can be perceived. In a good enough school, education is not a matter of statistical, absolute magnitudes – it is instead something that is to a very high degree relative. A good enough school with its strategy of finding and communicating balance and perspective is a necessity for all those students who are caught in a relationship of inferiority and powerlessness vis-à-vis their own education. However, our material also contains a small number of students who demonstrate genuine individual sovereignty, students who through their own strength have found the key to a balanced relationship with school. We have chosen to call these students the strategists. Their accounts of their life at school are permeated by a slight distance, by a tone which shows they’ve ”sussed the system”. Like any other students, there are times when they find school hard to bear, but it has its lighter moments and there is frequently something to laugh about. These are students who have a firm sense of their own identity; and school, however confusing and clumsy it can be, never succeeds in curbing their independent will completely. Let us once more return to Felicia’s correspondence, and listen to her penetrative, and at the same time amiable, comment regarding her teachers:
“but then, that’s just the way some teachers are. That’s the fun thing about school. How would we otherwise ever cope with our lessons if we didn’t have our nutty teachers to look at?”
Now that’s a strategist talking!
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However, as we have touched on previously, individual sovereignty and personal strategies can also give rise to problems – for example, when powerlessness is expressed in terms of individual sovereignty, i.e. when the only area of power left open to students is their power over themselves; there is then a risk that their assertion of their own territorial rights can take on a near- totalitarian character. In such a system there is only room for strong, sharp- witted individualists. A high level of skill at “duping” and manipulating the system represents a kind of rationality which does not tally well with the dialogistical view of education embodied in the national curricula. At the same time, perhaps the problem does not lie with the students; in a system characterised by clarity and openness – the good enough school – there is no need for this “cheating” or “creeping”. If for example a teacher clearly explains what kind of achievement is required to obtain a given grade, the students do not have to waste their time working out when, where and how to put up their hand when a question is asked (see the examples in the section Sussing out the System). The concept of “good enough-ness” can of course also be seen to apply if we view the situation of young people from a broader sociological perspective. Ziehe maintains that in our modern society, where existential questions and matters of world importance are permanently and universally in the air, where traditions are constantly being eroded and where the ego is the supreme reference point, there is a major risk that young people’s view of the world will become narrow and slanted rather than wide and open (see for example Ziehe, 1995, pp 19 – 21). The explanation for this paradox lies in the fact that young people feel themselves to be “ready before they’re ready” – they think they’ve experienced all there is to experience before they’ve really experienced anything of life at all. Stina, who we saw felt she was “too big for this town”, provides an expression of this when she says “I’ll probably move to Seattle one of these days”. If anything is to appear new and exciting for these young people it has to be more and more extreme; and in this perspective the good enough school can function as a necessary corrective. The unique thing about school is that it has the ability to create meetings and interchange between differences – a process that gives rise to a rich normality in which differences are seen as assets, as guides and possibilities in the process of learning and ethical development. It is only when this is part of everyday practice that it is possible to understand one’s own way of thinking in relation to other people and realities outside oneself. This approach to the work of schools, an approach based on feeling, empathy, awareness and rhythm, can thus be said to depend on aesthetic qualities. The ethical task facing the good enough school is primarily about justice, about including and accommodating everyone in school life, irrespective of the differences prevailing between them. A school with this ethos lays a solid foundation for the development of students’ sense of right and wrong, good and bad. It is doubtless possible to create the good enough school in various ways. In
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our discussion of the results of our project we have pointed to certain ways which we believe would lead in the right direction, certain ingredients of a better school, a school which endeavours to be good enough. However, the exact steps to take and ingredients to include is a matter to be decided on the basis of each individual school’s specific circumstances.
Overall Reflections on the Study This study, as we stated in the introductory pages, is built on a totally student- centred perspective on school. We see this standpoint as being both a problem and a source of strength. Our choice of perspective necessarily entails that the experiences of adults are relegated to second place, or are only interpreted via the way they are understood by the students. The result of this is that our study is lacking in symmetry, since the adult perspective and the parallel processes which take place in the classrooms, corridors and staff-rooms of the school world are excluded from the analysis. At the same time, however, we see it as a strength that we have stuck to the principle of letting the students present their own thoughts in their own voices, in a way that leaves their integrity intact and without any interference from their school, teachers or parents. It can be added that this approach makes greater demands than usual on the ethical integrity of both the research and the researcher’s actions. In this kind of study, where the researcher as a person is the very instrument used in the research process, the researcher’s assumptions and points of departure need to be subjected to close scrutiny. Over a period of five terms we have, by means of exchanging letters, followed the lives of and identified with our correspondents, and have thereby been very much influenced by what they have had to say. At the same time, the duty of the researcher includes being able to take a step back, reflect over the material and apply a “cool-headed”, intellectually more disciplined approach to the data. In our case, the process of coming to an understanding of the data has entailed a process of both centralisation – sharing the students’ perspective – and decentralisation – being able to step out of this student-centred perspective and view what we see in a theoretical framework. As we pointed out above the students are individuals with utterly personal character traits and stories to tell of their lives, but at the same time they are also “all students”; they are all at the receiving end of the influence of the media and of the various phenomena associated with youth culture, and they are all schoolchildren who, during their school career, share certain existential parameters. This fact makes our correspondents’ accounts interesting, irrespective of the individual story they have to tell. As far as methodology is concerned we have adopted an eclectic stance vis- à-vis the prevalent approaches to qualitative analysis. In the initial stages we applied a strictly phenomenographical interpretive framework to the textual material; however, as the volume of text grew we moved more and more towards
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a theoretical framework and began viewing the students and the school system as cultural, transcendent phenomena. At the same time, our interest in comparing individual schools or specific groups on the basis of aetiological factors has been moved down the agenda. One reason why we avoided comparisons of this kind was the limited number of different schools and individual students included in our project. It has not either, for practical reasons, been possible for us to effect detailed descriptions of the different schools’ individual history, the educational methods followed or the social life existing in and around the school. Moreover, we have not attempted to study in depth the personal biographies of the individual students (i.e. other than such aspects as the students themselves mentioned spontaneously in their letters) – this primarily out of respect for the students’ integrity. Looking back, we can see that such a biographical inquiry would not have been necessary in any case, given our aim of gaining a deeper understanding of life at school and of school’s role in life. The way our correspondents view school and the accounts they give of what an ordinary day at school is like display a striking similarity of pattern, irrespective of which particular school they attend – and this despite the fact that our project embraced schools of vastly differing character with regard to size, geographical position, and sociocultural and ethnic composition. While on one level it can be said that the schools’ differing individual characters do emerge from the letters, this variation evaporates at a deeper analytical level, where the archetypical features are all the more pronounced. A further analysis which we chose not to conduct. despite the fact that the material presented an opportunity for such a study, was the analysis of the development of the students’ texts in terms of both form and content. The simple reason for our not effecting such an analysis was shortage of time, and we can add that the material is still available, and would without doubt represent a rich source for studies of writing development over a number of important years in young people’s school careers. At a rough statistical level we have however looked at such aspects as developments in length of letter from the first letter written to the last, and differences between the sexes with regard to length of letter and content (see the Research Report). One conclusion we were able to reach is that year 5 at comprehensive school is perhaps a little early for a writing task of this kind. Across the board the letters we received from students in year 5 were shorter, and could in certain cases be interpreted as showing that the students had not properly understood what it was we had asked them to do. This being said, from year 6 onwards there was a clear development towards greater writing proficiency. This finding reflects the explorative, open approach we have adopted throughout the whole of our project. Since the study had no predecessors we have had to progress by trial and error – an approach we have had to apply throughout, from the establishment of the sample, the instructions given to the correspondents and the choice of themes for the letters, to the analytical methods used on the material received. Some of these “trials” proved to be
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unsuccessful and obliged us to rethink and revise our plans. While the work was in progress, the discussions we had with researchers and other experts functioned as important correctives, and were of considerable value in ensuring that the research process was kept moving forwards. Although the study in a number of respects was investigative and exploratory in character, there are a number of points on which we feel relatively certain. One such point is that we are convinced that correspondence with students over a period of time in the manner we tried is a completely feasible and fruitful method for acquiring knowledge about school from behind the gates which traditional study methods close. However, if a successful result is to be achieved one pre-requirement is the establishment of a natural and trustful relationship between the researcher and the correspondent. We are also convinced that students, at least from year 5 (i.e. age 12) and upwards, by means of writing can gain a “reflective distance” to their own actions, and thus in the true sense of the expression function as “partners in research”. During the 2 1/2 years for which the study ran we were able to observe a successive extension of the reflective ability of several students. Future studies in the same genre ought however to include a complementary adult perspective on school. Throughout the project, we have been aware of the absence of the teachers’ own voices. One possible course to take would be to allow teachers and students from the same school to give their accounts on a parallel basis. The question as to whether the letter is the most appropriate form in which to ask teachers to describe their life at school can be left open. Perhaps a combination of in-depth interviews with teachers and an exchange of letters with students would prove to be a fruitful formula.
Christian Lundahl and Oscar Öquist
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100 A Good Enough School Report n:o 164 A Good Enough School A study of life at school, and School’s role in lifeet Final report from the project “Students as Partners in Research”
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