Fitting In: White Working-Class Boys' Identity Negotiations of Values, Aspirations, and Motivations Through an Intersectional Framework

• In Event: 61.035 - Boys' Intersectionality and Schooling: In Pursuit of Interpretative Frameworks, Policy, and Practice

Abstract

Non-migrant White working-class boys remain the lowest attaining group in the United Kingdom’s educational system (Strand, 2008). This ethnic group is also less socially mobile when compared to ethnic minorities from similar class backgrounds (Platt, 2007). Alarmed by these trends, “raising aspirations” has become central to education policy in the United Kingdom (DfE, 2010; Cabinet Office 2011). Scholars partly attribute this ethnic group’s underachievement to neoliberal rhetoric frequently labeling these boys as having “low aspirations,” or no aspirations at all. Within educational policies governed by neoliberal ideology (Giroux, 2004; Raco, 2009), the “aspiration problem” has become increasingly individualized. Aspiration itself is regarded as a personal character trait “where policy documents often associate low aspiration with other personal qualities such as inspiration, information, self-esteem, and self-efficacy.” (Spohrer 2011, p. 58)

Framed by debates regarding masculinity and schooling, and working-class disadvantage, this paper embeds intersectionality within a Bourdieussian framework to investigate how White working-class boys experience their social and learner identities. Avoiding fixed definitions of identity, or typologies, Bourdieu’s signature concepts of habitus, field, and capital were drawn upon to understand the complexities and negotiations associated with reconciling educational success with working-class values. Intersectionality became particularly useful while exploring how boys conceptualized aspiration as a class, ethnic, and gender construction. The weight of class, gender, or ethnicity within habitus was also essential to analysis. These “weightings” increased or decreased depending on the field. Davies (1989) argues the social categories of intersectionality have more or less salience, or weight within subjectivities under particular social conditions (Ali, 2010; Reay, 2010). Alongside ethnicity, class, and gender, the nexus between identity, aspiration, values, and motivations was carefully analyzed. There was a clear focus on boys’ meaning-making practices, “identity work” (Wexler, 1992; Nayak, 2003), and various disjunctures and commonalities among their social and learner identities. (Reay, 2002)

The participants were 23 working-class boys (ages 14-16) from three South London school sites. Approaching the tensions between social and learner identities through a school-based ethnography, interviews, focus groups, and a visual method was conducted with the boys. These data sources nevertheless revealed how the dominant neoliberal discourse, which values a competitive, economic, and status-based form of aspiration, heavily shaped the subjectivities of the participants. The boys did not want to be (or to be seen as wanting to be) better than others; and this key finding must be considered a direct response to neoliberal ideology, and how achievement and aspiration are represented in school contexts. Boys’ habitus centered on egalitarianism – where the boys want to “fit in,” where everyone has an “equal say in the world,” and where “no one is better than anyone else,” or “above there station” (Lawler, 1999; Archer, et al., 2003). The implications of these findings suggest student motivation toward academic success is grounded in boys’ classed, gendered, and ethnic identity constructions.

Author

• Garth Stahl, University of South Australia