Title:
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Excluded students' perceptions of their educational experience : a model for understanding.
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This is a study of excluded students' perceptions of their educational experiences. The
findings are based on the accounts of thirty-three predominantly working-class young
men and women from different ethnic backgrounds, all of whom have been permanently
excluded from school and are attending Behavioural Support Service Centres. Chapter
One shows how debates on exclusion have failed to take into account the views of
excluded students. This work is set within two bodies of literature, discussed in Chapter
Two. The first is the sociological work into school culture and its influence on identity
formation. Central to this discourse, as well as the present study, is the role of structure
and that of agency in shaping the experience of school. The second area of literature that
frames this work is the newly emerging research on youth perspectives in education. The
key concern within this new area of research is how youth perspectives can be 'used' to
generate theory and inform policy and practice. This study identifies and explores those
aspects of the educational experience that are most salient to this group of young people,
gaining insight into their understanding of their educational experience. The
methodology employed to achieve this, discussed in Chapter Three, has been necessarily
qualitative, aiming to access the meaning young people give to their experiences and to
value this meaning as a legitimate form of knowledge. The focus is on the experience of
school, using the young people's experience in alternative provision as a point of
comparison. Chapters Four to Eight discuss these areas of meaning. Chapter Four
considers the interviewees' understandings of their own behaviour and of their exclusion.
This chapter provides insight into the interviewees' perceptions of the role they have
played in constructing their experiences of school. Chapter Five explores the important
influence of teacher-student relationships on individuals' experience of school. It looks
at the ways in which teachers are perceived to exercise power that serve either to
communicate 'caring' and 'valuing' or, more often, to infantilise young people. Chapter
Six describes the antagonistic social atmosphere that exists amongst peers at school, and
explores the different patterns of interactions the interviewees adopt within this
environment. Chapter Seven examines factors outside of school that significantly
intersect with and influence the school experience of some interviewees, such as family
difficulty and relations with neighbourhood peers. Chapter Eight explores the
interviewees' consistently positive view of school work in the Centres compared to that
in mainstream school. It also examines differences in engagement levels between
interviewees. On the basis of the interviewees' accounts, the School Experience Triangle
Model is developed in Chapter Nine to provide a conceptual understanding of young
people's varied experiences in school. The particular benefit of this model is its ability
to explain changes in the experience over time. Central to the model is the notion of
restrictive borders that are both externally-imposed and self-constructed. Through this
concept, power relations in educational institutions, as perceived by the interviewees, are
explored. The suggestion is made that the power relations in school serve to delegitimise
the experiences, knowledge and skills of low-status youth. The implication for
practice, discussed in Chapter Ten, is that power relations need to change in order to
provide a more inclusive education system. One significant means for changing power
relations in the school is to listen to the views of students and incorporate them into
policy and practice.
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