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Critical Studies in Education

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Pedagogies of becoming in an end-of-the-line 'special' school

Deborah Youdella
a
Institute of Education, University of London, London, UK

Online publication date: 21 September 2010

To cite this Article Youdell, Deborah(2010) 'Pedagogies of becoming in an end-of-the-line 'special' school', Critical Studies
in Education, 51: 3, 313 — 324
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 Critical Studies in Education
Vol. 51, No. 3, October 2010, 313–324

Pedagogies of becoming in an end-of-the-line ‘special’ school

1750-8495
1750-8487
RCSE
Critical Studies in Education
Education, Vol. 51, No. 3, Jul 2010: pp. 0–0

Deborah Youdell*
Critical
D. Youdell
Studies in Education

Institute of Education, University of London, London, UK

(Received 22 April 2009; final version received 22 June 2010)

In this paper I draw on ethnographic data generated inside an English ‘special’ school
for boys designate as having ‘social, emotional and behavioural difficulties’. I offer a
detailed analysis of one teacher’s pedagogic practices inside her ICT classroom and the
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boys’ responses to this. I suggest that the teacher’s pedagogy, and the classroom, are
marked by movements and flows of bodies, practices, affectivities and subjectivities.
Following from this, I argue that this mobility opens up the possibility of identification
and recognition as student and learner to boys who have previously been judged to be
beyond the bounds of intelligibility in prevailing education discourse. I explore whether
sites such as this one might offer a useful space for thinking about the possibilities for
pedagogies that move beyond normative notions of the school, the teacher, the student
and the learner.
Keywords: becoming; critical pedagogy; special educational needs; subjectivation

Linux

It is morning break at Bay Tree School for boys designated as having ‘social, emotional, and
behavioural difficulties’. I am in the ICT room with Miss Groves, the school’s ICT teacher,
white and aged around 40. Her willful hair is coloured a deep red and her eyes are framed
with smoky liner. The room buzzes with noise, activity and feeling. Each terminal is occupied
by a boy playing on the Internet and several others have pulled chairs up and look over the
shoulder of the user. There is the hum of turned up music escaping from headphones and a
Hip Hop track plays to the room from a terminal whose headphones have been discarded.
Boys call out, eyes rarely leaving the screen. Gaming tips and challenges, site curses and
recommendations, self-congratulation and put-downs pop around the room. Bodies vie for
access to terminals, with entreaties turning to demands and half meant shoves. Miss Groves is
standing by the teacher’s desk with Graeme, a 14-year-old white boy with floppy dark hair
and an oversized school jumper. They are looking at a laptop as they discuss the installation
of Linux and Bluetooth. It seems that this is an old and now unused staff laptop and, with
Miss Groves’ guidance, Graeme is doing the upgrade and installation. The pip signaling the
end of break-time sounds but none of the boys look like they are about to leave the room.
Miss Groves calls out to them to finish off, save and go on to their lessons. Graeme wants to
stay in the ICT room to carry on working on the laptop but Miss Groves wants him to go to
his next lesson. After some negotiation they agree that Graeme can take the laptop to his next
lesson where his teacher may well agree to him continuing with it. As boys begin to leave the
ICT room I go and sit in the Quad outside, watching as bodies disperse around the school. For
a few minutes bodies cut a web of lines across the Quad, filling it with movement that gradually
slows to an occasional passing through. Perhaps ten minutes later Graeme appears in the
Quad with the laptop under his arm. He walks purposefully, on his way to his lesson I assume.

*Email: d.youdell@ioe.ac.uk

ISSN 1750-8487 print/ISSN 1750-8495 online

© 2010 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/17508487.2010.508810
http://www.informaworld.com
 314 D. Youdell

A teacher, a white man in his mid-forties, appears and moves quickly in Graeme’s direction
calling out ‘Hey! Graeme! Where are you going with that?’ Just for a moment Graeme
hesitates and glances across in the direction of the call. And then keeps on in the direction he
is going. The teacher ups his pace, striding in pursuit and, perhaps inevitably, intercepts
Graeme half way across the Quad. The teacher bears down on Graeme, leaning in and over
him, his hand on Graeme’s upper arm. A short exchange follows and I guess that the teacher
is demanding an account of the laptop. Graeme appears to satisfy the teacher and is allowed to
continue with the laptop still under his arm. (Fieldnotes, Summer 2008).

Introduction
‘Special schools’ for those diagnosed as having ‘social, emotional and behavioural
difficulties’ (SEBD) are sites of containment and of correction. They are repositories for
bodies that exceed the normative requirements of schooling (Youdell, 2006, 2010a). They are
places into which the students who mainstream schooling cannot or will not accommodate are
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‘spaced out’ (Armstrong, 2003). They are the sites to which schooling’s abject subjects
are expelled, preventing corruption and contamination but always a reminder of its possib-
ility, always demarcating the line between the normal and the abnormal, the acceptable
and the abhorrent (Kenway & Hickey-Moody, 2006). They are where the designated and
diagnosed are corralled, monitored and surveilled, where they are made again and again as
the failed, the out of control, the aberrant, the pathological. Where subject-hood is tenuous
and where recognizability rests on diagnoses and designations of disorders and difficulties
(Graham, 2007; Harwood, 2006; Youdell; 2006).
Yet special schools, like other abject spaces, are also spaces of life and desire, of
pleasure and learning, of identification and recognition, of care and subject-hood
(Grinberg, 2009). The teachers, teaching assistants, residential care workers and other
staff in this school are not simply the warders patrolling the corridors of the Victorian
asylum or workhouse. But nor are they just the almost saintly inclusive educators of our
imaginations. These teachers are positioned between a multiplicity of educational and
popular discourses. These discourses are steeped in historicity and sedimented meanings,
such that their meanings stick and are frequently irreconcilable (Butler, 1990; Foucault,
1990). At the same time, these discourses and their meanings have been and continue to be
struggled over. The historicity of these struggles also adheres in the meanings of these
discourses and informs what struggles we might meaningfully pursue in the present
(Youdell, 2010a). Furthermore, these discourses constitute and constrain the subjects who
inhabit these spaces (Foucault, 1990, 1991). They constrain what sort of teacher it is
possible to be here and whether it is even possible to be recognized as a teacher. What
does it mean to be the adult (teacher? warder?) who pursues the boy across the Quad?
What does it mean to be the adult (teacher? fool?) who lets the boy take the laptop away
with him? Is it possible to be both of these adults at once? Can the Warder also be the
inclusive educator? How does it feel to be these adults and what does this feeling do here?
Inclusive education has done much to imagine, argue for and demonstrate an education in
which students are not sorted and sifted into the normal and the abnormal, the desirable
and the intolerable, the ideal and the impossible (Youdell, 2006). Taking up the ideas of
critical pedagogy and transformative education, inclusive educators have looked to education
systems, institutions and practices that can, by changing themselves rather than attempting
to ‘correct’ or expel the child, meaningfully accommodate all students (Allen, 1999;
Armstrong, 2003; Barton, 2001). In the UK there is a policy commitment to retain students
identified as having special needs inside mainstream schools. Yet with competition based on
performance in national tests secured as the key driver within education and in the face of the
 Critical Studies in Education 315

‘ability’ groupings and differentiated SEBD provisions inside mainstream schools that go
along with this, there is little incentive, resource or conceptual space for mainstream education
to pursue inclusive education. In this context of competitive education markets and national
testing regimes those students who fall outside the ideal or even the tolerable student-
learner are triaged out of mainstream schooling into these ‘special’ and ‘alternative’
education spaces (Youdell, 2010a). Official government statistics show that there are
almost 100,000 students attending such provision in England (Department for Children,
Schools and Families, 2008).
Nevertheless, within mainstream and special schooling educators continue to make
efforts to pursue the principles of inclusive education and create spaces in which the
boundaries of normal/abnormal are troubled. For instance, Cath Laws’ work in Australian
special schools shows how an SEBD discourse that locates normality and abnormality in
the essence of the subject can be unsettled by scrutinizing the notion of ‘normal’ alongside
students and offering them tools for ‘doing normal’ as a practice that has the potential to
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reconstitute them in these terms (Laws & Davies, 2000). More widely, critical pedagogies
informed by critical, feminist, queer, post-structural, anti-racist, post-colonial and critical
race theories have sought to conceptualize and identify in practice pedagogies that have the
potential to expose, challenge and shift enduring educational inequalities and exclusions and
the regimes of knowledge that these rest on (Allen, 2004; Atkinson & DePalma, 2009;
Davies, 2003; Grande, 2004; hooks, 1994; Leonardo, 2005; Luke & Gore, 1992; Nieto,
2004). In my own work I have shown how teachers deploy pedagogic interventions to
intercept the subjectivating effects of ‘special’ students’ practices that exceed the bounds
of the ‘normal’ student. A teacher’s insistence to a class that ‘you can’t hear him’
(Youdell, 2006) or a Headteacher’s assertion to a school assembly that ‘I can’t see him’
(Youdell, 2010a) can be understood as instances of such attempts. While the effects of
such interventions cannot be guaranteed, and while they inevitably bring with them their
own subjectivating effects, they do begin to suggest that teachers can and do act to unsettle
the normal/abnormal dichotomy at the core of SEBD discourse.
In this paper I make use of ethnographic data generated in the summer of 2008 through
a study inside an English end-of-the-line ‘special’ school. The school where the research
took place, which I call Bay Tree, caters for boys aged 5 to 16 who have been designated
as having ‘social, emotional and behavioural difficulties’ and provides a day school as
well as residential accommodation and therapeutic services. The practice of ethnography and
the representations that it generates are not straightforward. Post-structural engagements with
ethnography, such as my own, foreground the circulation of discourses and their constitutive
force, including the ways they constitute particular sorts of subjects, in research encounters,
representations and analyses (Harwood, 2006; Maclure, 2004; St. Pierre & Pillow, 2000;
Youdell, 2006). This move suggests that ethnographic representations are shot through
with the discursive repertoires that inform researcher’s judgments about what was going
on, who was engaging with who, what was and was not important and ‘who’ people are.
We are always ‘in’ our data, representations and interpretations discursively,
psychically and affectively and we cannot, nor should we want to, weed ourselves out
of the field, representation or analysis (Pillow, 2003; Youdell, 2010b). Nevertheless,
ethnography continues to offer detailed representations of the everyday that allow us
to interrogate discursive practices, the subjectivating force of these and the minutiae
of their interruption.
In this paper I explore whether, situated as they are on the margins of education, sites
such as this ‘special school’ might offer a useful space for thinking about the possibilities
for pedagogies that move beyond normative notions of the school, the teacher and the
 316 D. Youdell

student. In exploring these possibilities and processes, the paper foregrounds notions of
subjectivation, recognition, identification and affectivity as well as the possibility of
‘becoming-otherwise’. Subjectivation suggests that, constitution in and by discourse, the
subject is at once made a subject and subject to relations of power (Butler, 1997; Foucault,
1990). This simultaneous being-made-subject-to power and being-made-a-subject means
that subject-hood is always situated and constrained and, therefore, particular subjectivities
must be ‘recognizable’ (Butler, 1997, p. 5, emphasis in original) in those discourses that
circulate in the settings and moments in which they are called up. Recognition and
identification, then, are tied up in processes of subjectivation as well as in the possibility
of particular subject positions being resisted and reinscribed (Butler, 1997, 2004). These
ideas have underpinned a great deal of recent work in education concerned to understand
the constraints of identity and the possibilities for identities to be resisted in educational
settings (see, for instance, Davies, 2003; Harwood, 2006; Rasmussen, 2006; Renold,
2005; Youdell, 2006a).
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The notion of ‘becoming-otherwise’ is situated in Deleuze and Guattari’s (1983, 2008)

wider thinking about assemblages and rhizomatics. The idea of the assemblage suggests
that apparently ‘whole’ entities, such as societies or institutions, might be understood as
assemblages of heterogeneous components that cross-cut state, social, representational,
discursive, subjective and affective orders (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983, 2008). This idea is
useful for conceptualizing the ways that economy and politics, policy, organizational
arrangements, knowledge, subjectivity, pedagogy, everyday practices and feelings come
together to form the education assemblage. While for Deleuze and Guattari such
assemblages are, in their terms, ‘overcoded’ with meaning and run through with ‘molar
lines’ and scored with deep ‘striations’, the possibility remains for assemblages to be
deterritorialized and even converted (Hickey-Moody, 2009). Key to these deterritorializations
are ‘lines of flight’ that flee from and potentially scatter assemblages of meanings,
representations, practices and subjectivations and offer new ‘becomings’. Such becomings
are ‘anti-subjectivation’ because flights from the assemblage include flights from the
constraints of subjectivated subjectivities. As such, Deleuze and Guattari’s (1983, 2008)
thinking about affectivities, understood as eruptions and flows of bodily sensation and
intensities that exceed symbolic orders and are beyond or before the subject, are important
aspects of these becomings (Deleuze & Guattari, 2008; Hickey-Moody & Malins, 2007).
Becomings-otherwise, then, might offer a move beyond the recognitions and reinscriptions of
a Butlerian performative politics. Deleuze and Guattari’s work has recently begun to be
put to work in education. The notion of the assemblage has been drawn on to understand
education and the workings of particular education disciplines and pedagogic practices
(see Hickey-Moody, 2009; Leahy, 2009; Rose, 2000; Tamboukou, 2008) and their under-
standing of affectivities has been taken up by education researchers to explore new possi-
bilities for thinking about pedagogy and pedagogic encounters (see Bolar, 1999; Davies &
Gannon, 2009; Hickey-Moody, 2009; Zembylas, 2007). In this paper I deploy these tools
from Foucault, Butler and Deleuze and Guattari together in order to understand the way
that the school, teacher and student are corralled and how these might be spaces and sub-
jects that are becoming-otherwise.
Using this set of ideas to think about the episode that opens this paper we can see boys
engaged in and with identifications and recognitions practicing in ways that subjectivate
them as boys and as ICT-competent and sub-culturally sophisticated cool boys. Inside the
ICT classroom we can see this recognition offered by Miss Groves at the same time as she
offers recognition as students and as learners. Yet outside this classroom, as the teacher
flies across the Quad to intercept Graeme (the suspicion of theft implicit in the moment)
 Critical Studies in Education 317

and as Graeme turns momentarily to the hail but walks on, we can also see this recognition
refused and this identification set aside, perhaps in the tacit knowledge of its impossibility
in this moment, its situated-ness in Miss Groves’ ICT room. For a flicker I see the teacher
in the Quad as Althusser’s policeman and Graeme as the subject who cannot escape the
policemen’s hail – he is rendered a subject under suspicion and a subject in relations of
power (Althusser, 1971). Graeme’s passage from Miss Groves’ ICT room and into the
Quad is a passage from the pedagogic to the disciplinary, from subjectivation as learner to
subjectivation as ‘SEBD’ or ‘thief’. As the teacher leans over Graeme and hold his arm the
discourses that prevail in the SEBD school bear down on him and I wonder if Graeme will
buckle under their weight. But Graeme is not simply subject to the subjectivating force of
these discourses. Having been made a subject, he acts, and instead of acting his place in
the discourse of the socially, emotionally and behaviourally disturbed, he deploys another
discourse and acts a place in a discourse of the ‘good’ student enthusiastically involved in
extra-curricular learning. Likewise this teacher is not simply determined by the discourses
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that prevail here, he too shifts from his place in the discourse that demands that he control
and police to a place in a teacherly discourse in which the hand placed on the arm can
mean friendly reassurance as he listens to a students account of himself and in which the
boy can be recognized as a student and a learner whose possession of the laptop is wholly
legitimate. In the moment of the hail and the interception it seems that all three of us
understand, at least tacitly, that in this place, in this discursive frame, the hail, pursuit and
interception are almost inevitable, or even required. What might surprise us all is that the
explanation is accepted without Graeme being marched back into Miss Groves’ classroom
for his story to be verified.
In the remainder of this paper I return to Miss Groves’ ICT classroom to consider the
possibilities for the boys in the class to be recognizable as students and learners, possibilities
that I suggest are opened up by the pedagogies that Miss Groves deploys.

Computers in Bay Tree Special School

Computers, and particularly the use of the Internet and online free games, are a key
interest and preferred activity of boys in Bay Tree Special School and are embedded in
their everyday life in school. It is an activity that appears to be preferred by all of the boys
I observed, whether during break time, lesson time or in ‘options’ on Friday afternoon
when boys with requisite ‘points’ earned during the week can choose from a number of
activities. The preference for using the Internet seems to be rivaled only by football and
basketball (for some), but using computers seems to be the most generalized desired
activity across all boys. Key sites in the school where boys use the Internet are: the school
Library where there are around eight terminals, enough for all the boys in a small class to
use a computer simultaneously; some classrooms where there are two or three computers
meaning that some but not all members of the class can use these; and the ICT classroom
where there are a dozen or more machines and is the best equipped computing space in the
school. There is a general sense that, while dependent on teachers’ approval, boys can use
computers whenever they are available. As in the story of ‘Linux’ offered above, during
break-time it is common to find either Miss Groves or a Teaching Assistant staffing the
ICT room so that as many boys as the room can accommodate can use computers. The
room is regularly full and may well attract more boys if it could accommodate more.
When a lesson is covered by a supply teacher, it is common for boys to ask if they can go
into the Library and use the computers for the duration of the lesson and this is often
accommodated if the Library is available.
 318 D. Youdell

The boys use the Internet to search for things of interest including horror and ghosts
stories, especially with images of ghosts; horror films; YouTube clips, especially of
extreme accidents and pranks such as those found on MTV’s Jackass; music artists; and
sexy, but not pornographic, images of women. Games played regularly include a vegetable
patch where boys plant, grow and sell products, a site that allows faces in photos to be
morphed or transformed, and action adventure and role-play games. Drag and circuit
racing games in which boys build their own cars and race against each other, betting on
the outcome of the race and so earning cash for modifications on their race cars, is
especially popular. Boys often use a single game at the same time and in the same room
but play on different terminals. Being free-access online games, the graphic quality is
limited in comparison to the latest commercially available games on, for instance, the Wii
or Playstation. The boys also play music online while they are on the computer, listening
aloud or on headphones. All boys have space on the server, although this is limited and
there are ongoing issues about whether and what they can save there. What the boys are
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interested in seems to shift collectively, with crazes adopted, spread and then left behind
as a new interest is found.

Google Earth

It is Miss Groves’ ICT lesson with a class of seven boys aged 13 to 14. Boys arrive at the ICT
classroom at the end of morning break. The classroom is a compact rectangle, with around six
terminals on either long wall, one set overlooking the quad, and a data projector on the short
wall next to the door. The room has a number of recent displays of the boys’ ICT work as well
as information about the development of the Internet and how it works. Chairs in front of each
terminal are back to back, giving a metre or so clear space to pass between them along the
classroom. All the terminals and some additional chairs are already occupied by boys who
have been using the computers during break-time, so a few minutes pass during which it is
unclear who is part of the lesson. Miss Groves calls over the general talk and music coming
from one machine that break-time is over and that boys who are not in her class need to logout
and go to their lessons. A couple of minutes pass while boys leave, apparently reluctantly, and
seating is negotiated, which includes some debate over preferred machines or locations as
well as moving to take up seats next to particular people. Miss Groves waits, occasionally
interjecting into the boys’ debates to encourage them to sort out who is sitting where and to
broker compromises over popular spots. One boy sits in a seat away from any terminal
towards the back of the classroom. Miss Groves asks him to come and sit at a terminal and
‘do the lesson’ and he responds that he’s not doing it. She encourages him, and when he
declines again she suggests that he just come and sit next to a particular boy and watch, which
he agrees to do.
Stuart remains at the computer he has been using during break time and Todd, who
seems to want that computer, points out to Miss Groves that he’s not in the class and
shouldn’t be there. Miss Groves replies that she knows but that Stuart has permission to
stay in ICT with her for the lesson. Todd nods and takes another seat. Stuart is searching
the Internet for information and images about Sid and Nancy – the lead singer of the Sex
Pistols and his girlfriend. Stuart invites the boy at the computer next to him to look at the
images and tells who Sid Vicious was and about how he murdered Nancy and died
himself of a heroin overdose. The boy pays attention to what Stuart is showing him and
nods an apparent appreciation of the story. Stuart flicks through a number of sites from
his history as he shows the boy, and then moves on to look at sites about other classic and
contemporary punk and alternative bands. Miss Groves doesn’t intervene in what Stuart
is doing.
As the boys settle behind their terminals they go to their preferred sites. Several go to the
popular car-racing site and narrate what they are doing, telling each other about their modifi-
cations and racing results and challenging each other to race. Others look up pictures of high
performance cars and motorbikes and others go to music sites. Several put on headphones and
listen to music stored in their personal spaces on the server.
 Critical Studies in Education 319

Miss Groves waits for all the boys who are not in the class to leave and for the boys in the
class to settle down at a machine. She periodically encourages them to ‘settle down’, but
doesn’t complain or chastise them for the time it takes or their ongoing talk.
Once the boys are all at a machine, and many if not all are using sites of their choice, Miss
Groves asks them to look at her because they are going to learn to use Google Earth. Most,
but not all, of the boys turn their heads to her and she calls one or two by name and asks them
to stop what they are doing for a moment, telling the class that we are going to do this and
then if there’s time later they can go back to playing their games. She has loaded Google
Earth onto her machine and is projecting it onto the data projector. She tells them that we can
use Google Earth to look up images of anywhere in the world and that we are going to use it
to look at the nature reserve that the school is visiting on Friday’s trip. She invites the boys to
open Google Earth on their own machines and, looking up the nature reserve, she suggests
that they look up the nature reserve as well. She demonstrates how they can move between
different sorts of images and talks them through these as she does it. She also points out
particular geographical features on the image and suggests that the boys search for information
about these.
The boys move between watching and listening; looking at the trip site on Google Earth
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themselves; looking up other places, especially their and each others home addresses and
ribbing each other for where they live; asking questions or commenting on Google Earth;
appearing to pay some attention while continuing to use their own preferred sites; and
commenting to each other and engaging in banter about what they are doing.
Where boys do not appear to be engaging at all Miss Groves calls to them by name and
invites them to ‘have a go’, suggesting that they might ‘just do it for five minutes’. When she
does this, boys often respond with ‘in a minute’ and she responds with ‘why not try it now’ or
‘just have a go’. She does not intervene to ‘correct’ those boys who appear to be only partially
engaging and leaves them to move in and out of engagement with the lesson. Miss Groves’
approach to the boys is open and friendly, accommodating but with a continual invitation to
participate and expectation that they will do so. Only when a boy who is not participating
becomes very loud and intrusive with the boy next to him does she intervene with a corrective
instruction that if he is not going to take part he must not disturb others – an instruction that he
appears to accept.
Miss Groves opens another window to show a Powerpoint show about the school trip. On
it there are links to various sorts of content, including space to insert information about the
geography of the site and the animals that live on it as well as space for photographs of the
trip and boys’ accounts of the day. Miss Groves guides the boys through a series of questions
on the Powerpoint show that will help them find the information needed and makes suggestions
for how they can find this online. As Miss Groves talks the boys through the questions on the
Powerpoint, one boy pays particular attention to a question about a mammal that is indigenous
to the nature reserve and she suggests that the boys open a new window and try to find the
answer to the questions about it. Several of them take up this invitation, calling out queries
and receiving tips from Miss Groves and other boys for what and where to search. As boys
find the information they call out what they have found and a conversation develops between
the boys and Miss Groves over the key features of the animal and the distinctions between it
and a near relative. Boys cut and paste information from the web into their own copies of the
Powerpoint ready for later use on a webpage about the trip.
Throughout the lesson the boys seem to slide in and out of participation – with their attention
moving between the teacher, their classmates and their computers and their activity moving
between those led and set by Miss Groves and their own use of the computers. Miss Groves
allows this movement, drawing individual boys back into the lesson with individual requests
and one-to-one suggestions and assistance. By the mid-point in the lesson, several of the boys
who began paying attention have returned to their own use of the Internet. Miss Groves con-
tinues to invite them back into the lesson activities. When they respond ‘I’ve done it, can’t I
do this now?’ she suggest one last task first and in this way negotiates their participation in
small sections of the lesson over its course. By the later part of the lesson, perhaps into the last
15 minutes, most of the boys have returned to their own uses of the computer and their
exchanges are about this. Miss Groves allows this gradual drift back into their recreational uses
of the computers and dialogue, having encouraged each boy to remain engaged with the lesson
for as long as possible and having ensured that each boy has saved the results of his activities.
 320 D. Youdell

Several boys return to the car-racing site and some of the others ask what it is and go to the
site. The boy who seems to have the most advanced knowledge of the game and the best
record of racing calls out tips for which car to choose, how to modify it with only the small
amount of money the game allocates on first playing and how to win money to make further
modifications. This boy has a highly modified racecar and has lots of wins and is betting big
on the outcome of his races. He announces how much he has and how much he is going to bet
on the next race, regularly risking everything on a race. As the boys play the game and engage
with each other about their game play they keep their eyes on their own screen. Sometimes a
boy calls out the name of another to address him particularly, but often the dialogue is gener-
alized and regularly seems more like a collective commentary than a discussion. (Fieldnotes
Summer 2008)

Pedagogies of becoming
In engaging with the practices, subjects and feelings of this classroom I am concerned to
explore what it is about Miss Groves’ pedagogy that makes this a lesson in which the boys
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can identify and be recognized by Miss Groves and each other as ‘cool’ boys at the same
time as they can identify and be recognized as ‘students’ and ‘learners’ and so take part in
the lesson.
This is a classroom, and a set of pedagogic practices, that seem to be marked by fluidity
and movement. The movement of bodies in and around the room, in chairs, at screens; the
movement between a variety of learning activities and between learning activities and
other uses of the Internet; the movements and flows of practices, and the affectivities that
go with them or, indeed, the affectivities that precipitate the flows across activities; the
movement between subjectivities – teacher to negotiator to something else, student to
learner to cool boy to ICT expert to racecar driver; the movement between identifications
and the recognition that Miss Groves offers to all of these subjectivities. In this classroom,
these movements and flows are acceptable, indeed, these flows might be the very moving
ground on which recognition and learning takes place.
The affectivities that flow in this classroom are palpable, the room buzzes. Bodies
shift and slide in seats, they slip down to a slouch, arms outstretched and then pull up
again. Bodies come into momentary collision in dispute over monitors, or headphones, or
barbed remarks. It is not my intention to attempt to pin down these feelings into their
‘proper’ place in the lexicon of emotion. ‘What’ is felt remains uncertain. But affectivities
flow around this room, moving from body to body just as bodies move between websites
and dialogues. The feelings of this classroom are palpable and are entwined with what the
boys and Miss Groves can do and be here.
A key aspect of the pedagogy of this classroom seems to be the limit of, or temporary
and partial erasure of, subjectivation as ‘SEBD’. Miss Groves’ practices do not constitute
the boys as ‘SEBD students’ – failed learners who are so far beyond learning that teaching
and learning is set aside and the classroom is handed over to their practices, the boys
contained through their own uses of the Internet. There is no either/or here – the binary
machines of subjectivation seem not to operate. Boys are not either student and learner or
SEDB boys or cool boys. Rather there is a simultaneity and fluidity to these positions.
Miss Groves pursues and engages the boys in a lesson and learning. This is not yet
another holding zone for SEBD boys whose abjection renders them beyond education. In
this sense it is difficult to read ‘SEBD subjects’ here, even as the practices in this class-
room do not look or feel like those of the normative classroom. The boys move across
identifications and recognition flows with their movements. The boys move from Google
Earth images of the nature reserve to Google Earth images of their own neighbourhoods,
 Critical Studies in Education 321

from discussion about geological features to ribbing and banter about the low-class areas
other boys live in. From nature reserves and mammals to Sid and Nancy and car racing.
The student-subject and the learner-subject here, then, is not predicated on an abiding
and fixed identity, rather it is the very fluidity of identifications that is the moving ground
on which recognition takes place. The expectation of conformity, singularity, consistency
is set aside. Miss Groves does not delineate a universal acceptable and unacceptable
student – she offers recognition across the boys’ subjectivating practices: ‘cool boy’,
‘angry boy’, ‘good student’, ‘reluctant student’ are all valid and viable.
These boys are subjectivated student and learner in the present, they are becoming
student and learner in each moment, without requiring prior or abiding constitutions or
requiring these constitutions to persist into the next moment. It is in the letting go of insisting
that the boys act the student consistently that Miss Groves opens up space for them to be
students. If the boys are subjectivated as ‘SEBD’ here, it is because this discourse is
deeply sedimented in this school and in education more widely and/or because the
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practices in this classroom breach the terms of the discourses that frame the normative
classroom, a breach that might, nevertheless, be read in prevailing education discourses to
suggest the non-normative and so ‘SEBD’.
Miss Groves’ practices do not cite and inscribe the ‘SEBD teacher’ and, simultane-
ously, the ‘SEBD student’. And yet her practices, and the boys’ recognition, do constitute
her as ‘teacher’. She has a lesson plan, teaching resources prepared, a clear sense of what
the students will learn, the work they will produce and she calls on the boys to take part in
the lesson, to take up the position of student and learner. Yet at the same time, she does not
corral and correct the boys’ myriad practices, evident throughout the lesson, that are out-
side a normative notion of the student and learner – playing on games and other websites,
calling out insults and banter, announcing refusal to take part in the lesson. In classrooms
where prevailing discourses of the ‘good’ students, the ‘SEBD student’ and the fixity and
incompatibility of these subjects remain unacknowledged or unquestioned, it is likely that
all of these practices would be unacceptable, policed and corrected and render the subject
the ‘bad student’ and ‘failed learner’. Instead, Miss Groves accommodates these practices,
all are valid – including resistances and refusals – all are engaged and taken up as constitutive
of viable student and learner subjects. All are to be coextensive with the practices of the
student and learner.
Miss Groves is teacher, yet she does not take up the authority of the teacher or demand
recognition from the boys in these terms. The usual power relations of the school are, at
least to some degree, set aside or on pause in this classroom. She negotiates and sometime
cajoles their participation, she accepts their ongoing entries into and exits from the lesson,
their tangents, their banter, as long as they continue to return to the lesson and learning –
which they do. Furthermore, it is not that Miss Groves teaches one group of students who
are engaging with the lesson while ignoring the others and leaving them to pursue their
own activities. Miss Groves allows and, through her ongoing invitations and negotiations,
enables the boys to move in and out of participation in the lesson and their own activities.
Only on one occasion during the lesson does Miss Groves appear to take up the traditional
authority of the teacher and deploy this to interrupt the practices of a boy in the room, and
this occurs when a boy not engaging in the lesson noticeably disturbs other boys. The
hierarchies of adult/child, teacher/student binaries are momentarily in full view.
Miss Groves’ mode of engagement with the boys – both those in the class and those
using the ICT room during break – is significant. She does not deploy the authority of the
teacher. She does not raise her voice, she does not demand prompt exit from the room at
the end of break-time and speedy take up of places at the beginning of the lesson. Rather,
 322 D. Youdell

she speaks in her usual voice, her vocabulary everyday, her tone conversational, her
volume perhaps a little projected. She does not insist that all boys work lock step through
the lesson. She does not position the boys as a single body that is either ‘boy’ or ‘student’
or ‘SEBD’. She does not assume resistance or refusal, but engages this when it comes. Her
practices seem to move from an assumption and assertion that this is a lesson and that the
boys are going to participate, as if this were quite ordinary in this school. And this
expectation of engagement and participation, this assertion of student and learner subjec-
tivities and the expectation that the boys move into this identification, even if this is
transitory and mobile, is recognized by the boys and they act the place offered to them in
Miss Groves’ classroom. No meta-negotiation of this temporary and mobile identification
takes place – Miss Groves does not discuss ‘doing student’ in the way that Cath Laws
discusses ‘doing normal’ (Laws & Davies, 2000). But it seems evident that there is a tacit
understanding between the boys and Miss Groves and that the boys take up the student
and learner subjectivities available in this classroom as an invitation, not as a compulsion.
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Of course Miss Groves retains the status of the teacher, at least to a degree – the boys
recognize her as teacher – but she does not assert either the teacher’s authority or the
teacher’s disapproval of their marginal student and learner subjectivities. For this lesson,
these boys’ abjection can fade from view.
Miss Groves’ practices do not seem to cite any of the discourses that constitute adults
in this school, they do not suggest a particular point of identification or recognition. Far
from being problematic, it seems that this haziness around what ‘sort’ of adult Miss
Groves might be is a key to the effects of her practice. She may be, in Deleuze and
Guattari’s framing, following lines of flight, deterritorializing the education assemblage
and becoming-otherwise. And as her pedagogy makes this classroom a space of becoming,
abject SEBD subjects may be becoming-student, becoming-learner, becoming-boy.

Conclusion
The movements and flows of bodies, affectivities, subjectivities and practices evident in
Miss Groves’ classroom would likely be disallowed in many education spaces, both in
mainstream schools and elsewhere in Bay Tree Special School. Yet her pedagogic
practices, including those that might not be recognizable as pedagogy in the framing of the
education assemblage, open up possibilities for mobile identifications and recognitions,
including identification and recognition as student and learner. In this sense, in this class-
room the teacher is becoming-otherwise and previously abject bodies are becoming-
student and becoming-learner – this might be, then, a pedagogy of becoming.
My focus in this paper has been on Miss Groves’ pedagogic practices and their effects
and so I have not explored the significance of this being an ICT classroom and Miss
Groves being an ICT teacher and expert. Given the popularity of ICT amongst the boys it
may seem reasonable to suggest that this contributes to the success of Miss Groves’
pedagogy, or even that it is the subject area and medium, and not the pedagogy, that is
important here. Yet the boys’ recreational use of ICT is focused on particular sorts of
entertainment sites and games that do not correspond closely to those used in the lesson.
While the boys’ wider attraction to ICT may be significant, I want to foreground the
pedagogic moves made by Miss Groves and the boys’ take-up of the multiplicity of
positions opened up to them in this space. This foregrounding helps us to think about a
place and political future for pedagogies of this sort beyond the ICT classroom.
The pedagogy deployed in this classroom does not guarantee that these boys will enter
for national examinations in this curriculum area, but it does go some way to making this
 Critical Studies in Education 323

option and the possibility of formal educational attainment available to them. Nor does it
guarantee the boys trajectories back into education provisions not designated as ‘SEBD’
or even into mainstream schools, but by offering them recognition and identification as
‘student’ and ‘learner’ it may well contribute to opening this possibility up for at least
some of them. It seems to me that this pedagogy does undo the abjection that has propelled
these boys into this setting, even if only temporarily, and that it has the potential to
contribute to rendering these boys recognizable as ‘student’ and ‘learner’ elsewhere in this
‘SEBD’ school. Perhaps most significantly, my reading of the practices in this classroom
begins to suggest how other educators in this school and elsewhere might take up pedagogies
of becoming in order to open up education to those who have been deemed to be beyond
the bounds of intelligibility and been excluded and expelled to education’s margins. This
pedagogy, in this classroom, cannot dismantle the education assemblage’s divide between
the mainstream and the ‘Special’ school or between the acceptable and the ‘SEBD’
student. However, it does begin to show how the education assemblage can be unsettled in
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ways that might begin to move towards its conversion (Hickey-Moody & Malins, 2007).

Acknowledgements
Thanks to Miss Groves, the teacher whose work I focus on in this paper. She was a generous host
during my research in her classroom and has continued to engage with me in thinking about practice
in the school and the sorts of subjects and pedagogies that were possible there. In particular I thank
her for her thoughts on and inputs into the preparation of this paper.

Notes on contributor
Deborah Youdell is Professor of Education at the Institute of Education, London. Her research is
concerned with inequalities and their relationship to subjectivities. It analyzes how policy, institu-
tional practices and everyday life in school make students and learners and how these processes
interact with race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, social class, ability and disability. She is author of
Impossible bodies, impossible selves: Educational exclusions and student subjectivities (Springer,
2006) and School trouble: Identity, power and politics in education (Routledge, 2010).

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