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Student Responses to the Experience of Schooling

Pupils experience a wide variety of ways that schools attempt to categorise and label them and, in response, they react and adapt in different ways.

__Lacy__

Lacy

  • Reactions often include the formation of pupil subcultures, which can influence pupil identities, motivation in schools and levels of achievement.
  • As part of this process, there is, what Lacy described as, ‘the process of differentiation and polarisation’.
Differentiation & polarisation

Differentiation & polarisation

  • Differentiation is the process by which pupils are ranked and categorised into different streams or sets.
  • Polarisation is when pupils become divided into opposing groups or ‘poles’; those labelled as top-stream conformist high achievers and those labelled as lower stream failures.
Responses

Responses

  • Differentiation and polarisation can then lead to a range of subcultural responses, including pro- and anti-school subcultures.
Pro-school subcultures

Pro-school subcultures

  • Pro-school subcultures encourage peer-group support for success in education and are most likely found among middle-class or skilled working-class backgrounds.
Anti-school subcultures

Anti-school subcultures

  • Anti-school subcultures are those likely to adopt a set of delinquent values as a means to resist a system of schooling that has labelled them as failures.
__Woods__

Woods

  • Woods found that there were a range of responses between pro- and anti-school subcultures that would change over time as pupils moved through different stages of schooling; this might be different in respect of gender, class, and ethnicity.
Jump to other topics
1

Theory & Methods

2

Education with Methods in Context

3

Option 1: Culture & Identity

4

Option 1: Families & Households

5

Option 1: Health

6

Option 1: Work, Poverty & Welfare

7

Option 2: Beliefs in Society

8

Option 2: Global Development

9

Option 2: The Media

10

Crime & Deviance

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