This book was enjoyed greatly I think by all of us in the book club, most especially for the style of its writing: engaging, funny and sad by turns, full of characters with whom we felt great sympathy, and of incident and analysis which connected with our interests and work. One of its great joys is the presence throughout the book of the author and even her family, telling us about how she came to the work, and its impact upon her during the period of her research, all written in a delightfully unpretentious, non-academic style, so that we the readers could connect too with her experiences, and make sense of the conclusions that she reaches. Several of us spoke about how suddenly we were seeing everything through its lens, how we were talking to everyone we met about it, and its one of those books I think which will shift the way we think and practice.
The community she is writing of is the community that she is living amongst, the people living on a housing estate in Bermondsey, South London and perhaps that’s what the name of the book should have ended (..in Bermondsey, rather than in Britain), because one of its conclusions (very much in keeping with Pedro’s findings described below for the Ladbroke Road/Portobello Road area) is that it is location that is crucial to how her subjects defined ourselves. She goes and talks with her neighbours, spends time in their homes, gives their children tuition and spends time in their children’s primary school, observing lives and telling us about what she sees. Its by turn funny, engaging and tragic, and never less than engaging.
Her central thesis is that schools are broadly middle-class in their orientation and values and that working class children are therefore poorly prepared for the way that education is delivered there: the ‘form of participation’ that is expected there simply does not match what is expected of them at home and in their immediate surroundings. In order for such children to participate in learning she sees that first of all they will need a ‘bodily disposition, a restraint that embodies order and readiness for concentrated application to work which demands conceptual thinking.’ What she doesn’t mention here but what this made me think about was the debate about ADHD and its prevalence in boys – and I wondered about whether there had been studies looking at its relationship to class. I particularly enjoyed this attention to the physical – she writes very memorably too about how she found herself walking differently round the streets of South London as the study went on – ‘I feel the weight of my feet on the pavement and a very subtle change in my stance as I begin to appreciate how the most common of Bermondsey girls come to claim the pavement as their own via the cultivation of a tough, territorial disposition.’ What she saw in the school she observed was teachers devoting large amounts of energies to managing (or failing to manage!) children’s bodily comportment, and the battles between them for status in the group. She tells horror stories reminiscent of ‘Lord of the Flies’ about the kinds of everyday cruelty between ten year old boys in classrooms that are quite outside their teacher’s (often locums) control, stories which are all about boys jostling for status and nothing at all to do with what we usually think of as education.
Some of the topics we discussed in the group was how particularly English the notion of class was (how ‘working class’ just didn’t translate in colonial contexts); how good the book was once again (as with other texts we have looked at together) on how race is a gendered experience; whether the author had ‘gone native’ in seeming to hold the view that to be valued in our society is to either be middle-class or to be ethnic in some way; the academic ideas that she was drawing from in her analysis (what are those Christina Toren references you promised Pedro?); the importance of knowledge and language structure as opposed to class; and finally how reading this text was affecting the way we thought about our work with families.
Several of us spoke about how for many of the families we worked with elsewhere in London the lack of a ‘predisposition’ for learning also rang true, while the pre-occupation amongst children for status amongst their peers was also all-consuming and interfering with the learning task. We looked forward to using the lens provided by the book to help orient ourselves to interviewing children, parents and teachers in ways that would be more likely to help them to find a way forward which recognised and appreciated such pre-occupations, and their impact upon family lives and relationships.
Philip Messent
30.7.07
Following my own analysis, thousands of persons all over the world receive the loans from different banks. Thus, there is good chances to receive a financial loan in every country.
Posted by: ANGELINECASTANEDA | 09/13/2010 at 09:10 PM