Identity, Self-confidence and Schooling for Citizenship: Listening to Young People
Abstract
Recent educational policy in Scotland advocates that education for citizenship and
the promotion of self confidence should permeate the curriculum and the ethos of a
school. These educational interventions are understood to be about inculcating
cultural values. This study uses critical ethnography to explore how a group of
teenage pupils in a Scottish comprehensive engage with and express cultural values
and the nature of the values expressed. The study explores the ways this diverse
group of young people creatively construct identities, how they ascribe and seek
social value, and the ways they enact, embody and resist social classification.
Utilising Bourdieu's concepts of habitus, capital and field the study illustrates that
young people's constructions of self and others reveal culturally embedded social and
moral codes. Although the discourse and practice of these contemporary young
people show changing conceptions of identity in relation to class, gender, sexuality
and race, they also illustrate entrenched social inequality. They further highlight that
subjectivities are ascribed by these categories and establishing identity is not merely
a "matter of individual decisions" (Beck & Beck-Gersheim 1996:29). The ways in
which young people enact, embody and assign social classification indicates the
enduring link between subject and structure. Implicit in young people's descriptions
of youth subcultures, for example, are social distinctions based on class, gender and
ethnicity in addition to condemnatory conceptions of what it means to be working
class.
This study also finds, however, that these young people do not passively absorb
dominant constructions of social value but creatively resist the social denigration of
ascribed identities, to try to establish self worth inducing representations of their
own. In this the young people are responsive to social field, the power structures and
cultural practices embedded in different locations around a school and in diverse
social worlds outside of school. The young people reveal multiple identities and the
capacity to negotiate conflicting and contradictory moral codes across diverse social
fields. Contra Bourdieu, and in keeping with aspects of Willis's (1977, 2004)
argument, the young people displayed agency which revealed insight into structural
classification. These young people valued the opportunity to talk and to have their
perspectives valued. Their insights support Freire's (1972, 2005) argument that the
popular culture of students is a useful starting point for an educational practice which
encourages dialogue, critical thinking and engagement with wider social issues.