Shame,Anger and the Lived Experience of School Disengagement for Marginalised Students: A Recognition Theory Approach

Abstract

Experiences at school are fundamental in shaping young people’s worldviews, sense of worth and willingness to engage, not only at school but also with wider society. This article seeks to gain a deeper understanding of processes of inequality and social exclusion by qualitatively investigating Australian young people’s narratives about their school experiences, paying attention to how relationality shapes schooling subjectivities. The framework of recognition theory is applied to analyse social relations embedded in and across these sites. The article underscores the difficulties disadvantaged students face in challenging their marginalised positioning, as these positions were relentlessly reinforced in their encounter with the educational system and institutional judgement. A student’s apparent ‘apathy’ and ‘disengagement’ towards school can in many cases be seen as resistance to exclusionary social relations. Schooling structures and processes taking account of young people’s relational struggles and strivings to belong may more successfully engage students at risk of disengaging.

Introduction

Substantial problems faced by young Australians, including lack of access to affordable accommodation, extended periods of financial dependence, structural labour market shifts, unemployment and underemployment, stagnating wage growth and big increases in debt (Rayner, 2016; Wyn, 2015). Education is, for most young people, part of the pathway to economic independence and social mobility in adulthood and has the potential to play an ameliorating role for marginalised groups (Skattebol et al., 2012). However, where advantaged students may experience education as a pathway to success and a better quality of life, disadvantaged students have been found to encounter subtle barriers entrenched within the school system, causing social exclusion and marginalisation (Cuervo & Wyn, 2012; Furlong, 2013; Reay, 2006). This article seeks to gain a deeper understanding of processes of inequality and social exclusion, by investigating disadvantaged young people’s narratives about their school experiences, paying particular attention to how social relations shape schooling subjectivities.

Although the last 40 years have seen important changes that impact ways in which social classes are reproduced in Australia, young people from low socio-economic backgrounds, Indigenous families or youth living in rural areas continue to be the most disadvantaged in terms of educational outcomes (Foundation for Young Australians, 2013; Zakharov, 2012). Educational research persistently highlights negative school experiences reported by working-class and marginalised young people (Mac an Ghaill, 1996; MacDonald & Marsh, 2004; O’Donnell & Sharpe, 2000; Tarabini et al., 2018; Willis, 1977). Likewise, the role that schools play in alienating and marginalising students has been well-documented in Australian, as well as international research (Ball et al., 2000; Cuervo & Wyn, 2012; Fine, 1991; te Riele, 2004). Worryingly, disadvantage appears to not only go unchallenged within educational institutions but to become ‘enshrined and perpetuated through educational policy’ (Reay, 2006, p. 299). These intersecting marginalities come in the form of local and place-based disadvantage, arrested academic and social achievements, as well as lowered expectations from those around them (Bottrell, 2007; Bottrell & France, 2015; Camilleri-Cassar, 2013; Farrugia et al., 2015). Education, evidently, does not equally distribute opportunities and outcomes. This makes schools important sites for investigating how best to provide opportunities, ensure equality of access, widen horizons and invite social commitment for young people experiencing social and material disadvantage.

Although there is no agreement on the degree of importance to be placed on individual versus structural factors, there is a general agreement that school disengagement cannot be traced back to a single event but is best understood as a process where several factors in the realms of the family, the school and wider community context collide (Rumberger, 2011; Stokes et al., 2008; Zakharov, 2012). Researchers focusing on institutional factors have highlighted the limited capacity of mainstream educational institutions to cater to students’ diverse approach to learning (Myconos, 2011; Zyngier, 2003). Others have shown how teachers lower their expectations in low-achieving students (Rios et al., 2010; Sarra, 2003) and often harbour negative assumptions and unconscious racial biases about non-white students’ behaviours and abilities (Camilleri-Cassar, 2013; McGrady & Reynolds, 2013). Young people from migrant and Indigenous backgrounds have been found to experience widespread problems within educational settings related to identity and communication (Moensted, 2020b), as schools were found to negate their cultural ways of knowing (McMurtry & Curling, 2008; Skattebol & Hayes, 2016). Brown and Rodriguez suggest an understanding of school disengagement as a ‘socially mediated phenomenon’ (2009, p. 221), highlighting the need to shift from focusing on identifying disengagement risk factors towards understanding interactions that make up young people’s everyday experiences of schooling. Along similar lines, Bunting and Moshuus (2017) show how the relationships young people have with teachers, parents, siblings and friends greatly mediate the process that leads to school disengagement. Despite the significant body of knowledge on early school leaving, less is known about the process of school disengagement from subjective perspectives of young people on the margins of educational institutions themselves (Rumberger & Lim, 2008; Tarabini et al., 2019). Additionally, few studies empirically investigate how schools, teachers and peers affect students’ behavioural, emotional and cognitive engagement (Fredricks et al., 2004; Van Houtte & Van Maele, 2012). This article is built on such a socially mediated understanding of schooling experiences (Brown & Rodríguez, 2009; Bunting & Moshuus, 2017; Skattebol & Hayes, 2016), by utilising recognition theory to investigate how social relations shape schooling subjectivities.

This study reaches similar conclusions as previous studies establishing a relationship between students’ socio-economic status and their identity as learners and opportunities for benefitting from education (Reay, 2001, 2010, 2018; Tarabini et al., 2018), but extends this knowledge in several ways. First, the study investigates the marginalising effects of schools through less observable cognitive (sphere of respect), emotional (sphere of love) and social (sphere of solidarity) dimensions. Second, young people’s stories testify to the additional relational demands that marginalised students are placed under. Furthermore, the analysis highlights the tremendous struggle young people undertake in search of care, respect and visibility, within institutions largely undervaluing or misunderstanding their types of interests, abilities and ways of being.

Reframing School Disengagement: The Potential of Recognition Theory

Recognition theory provides a relationship-based framework for understanding social problems in their historical context with emancipatory intent. Recognition theory is thought to be especially useful to illuminate psychological mechanisms of social conflicts, that is, social struggles for recognition, as well as the social and political resistance triggered by experiences of injury and disrespect in various forms (Honneth, 1996). Grounded in critical theory, and particularly drawing on the work of Honneth (1996, 2004), the concept of recognition captures how school as an institution of societal recognition may be considered ‘pathological’, that is, acting as a barrier preventing the realisation of the good life for some - and how school might instead support this realisation (Honneth, 2014).

Honneth (1996) proposes three spheres of inter-subjective recognition: love, rights and solidarity. Each sphere involves a mode of practical relations to self. The private sphere ideally entails emotional support and love, which is the prerequisite for the development of basic self-confidence. The sphere of rights and legal entitlements entails universal respect gained from rights, which generates self-respect. This form of recognition consists of universal and equal juridical treatment and is decisive for a person’s ability to participate in society on equal terms with others. The third sphere of cultural and political solidarity, coined ‘social appreciation’ by Honneth, entails self-esteem that is redeemed in social solidarity, where values are shared (Honneth, 1996). Each form of recognition constitutes both an integrative aspect of the social order and a step in the development of the person, as each form of recognition must be experienced to ensure the three basic modes of practical relation to self are developed. A person unable to receive emotional support, social esteem and respect, for instance, is at risk of losing practical self-relation (Frost, 2016). To be misrecognised is to be denied the status of a full partner in a social interaction, to be deemed less-than, valueless or invisible (Fraser, 2000). Relationships are fundamental to experiences of recognition, as acts of recognition and misrecognition, as well as demands for recognition, take place in relational spaces (Honneth, 1996). As also noted by Graham et al. (2016) ‘Opportunities for recognition and misrecognition lie in conversational spaces—talking, listening, hearing, acknowledging, responding—which are fundamental to relationships and for recognition to occur’ (p. 450). Although Honneth did not make young people a focus of his work, the three modes of recognition are as relevant to young people as they are to adults (Graham et al., 2016; Thomas, 2012).

For the adult population, employment is a major arena for recognition, and the advance of capabilities crucial for the development of a positive relation to self and society (Petersen & Willig, 2004). In the case of young people, school is arguably an equally essential sphere of recognition and the realisation of skills and abilities. Nurturing young people’s sense of recognition within educational settings can be understood as facilitating the development of the essential creativity and talents of the young person, which allows them to take part in society in a meaningful way (Petersen & Willig, 2004). Graham et al. (2016) have adapted Honneth’s three spheres of recognition into young people’s school settings in the following way: love, rights and solidarity respectively become ‘cared for,’ ‘respected’ and ‘valued’. Applying such a framework to an Australian study on young people’s school experiences the researchers highlight the centrality of caring, respectful and positive teacher-student relationships for young people’s sense of well-being.

In the case of young people experiencing social and economic disadvantage, however, school habitually fails as a sphere for recognition, delivering instead experiences of misrecognition, unbelonging and failure (Bottrell, 2007; Farrugia et al., 2015; Riele, 2011). As school is a major site for the development of social esteem, being deemed unworthy of respect and recognition in this arena shapes the individual’s relationship with the broader society. Fraser (2000) proposes that ‘redressing misrecognition now means changing social institutions—or more specifically, changing the interaction-regulating values that impede parity of participating at all relevant institutional sites’ (Fraser, 2000, p. 4). This broader model of recognition does not neglect material redistribution claims, such as unequal school funding, as has been documented in the latest review of school funding in Australia, the Gonski report (DEEWR, 2011), but suggests that we also interrogate how institutional judgements for certain groups of young people may lead to social exclusion. This involves investigating young people’s opportunities to develop competencies and capacities for active citizenship in their everyday practices within school settings, as this article will strive to do.

Research Approach and Data Generation Methods

The research on which this article builds took place across three regions in Australia, namely regional Victoria, metropolitan Victoria and metropolitan New South Wales. Participants were recruited through three youth programs: a juvenile justice program, a school re-engagement program and a remedial education youth service. These were located in neighbourhoods typically described as disadvantaged, meaning neighbourhoods with high unemployment, low labour market participation, low levels of weekly income, high levels of crime and high rates of young people disconnected from education and employment (Vinson, 2007). In seeking to construct rich data, and establish a form of triangulation, a range of qualitative data generating methods were chosen, namely interviews with youth practitioners, field observations at youth programs and workshops with young people. Only the data pertaining to the young people are presented in this article.

A total of six 2-hour workshops were conducted. Two workshops were run at each youth program with the same group of young people. The first workshop centred on a future scenarios exercise that examined participants’ longings towards, fears concerning and imaginings about the future and their version of ‘the good life’. The second workshop explored participants’ areas of mastery, self-esteem and belonging and what impacted and shaped these experiences. The workshops utilised several different strategies, such as task-orientated exercises; movements between individual reflection and group discussion; and the use of concrete objects, such as drawings, labels and pictures. The use of task-centred activities gives more control to young people, as they have more freedom in terms of setting the agenda compared to a focus group and encourages participants into a space of playful engagement, interrupting habitual conversational routines. During the workshops, there were no direct questions about the participants’ experiences at school. The topic of school was, however, raised in all groups by young people themselves, predominantly as a site for boredom, humiliation and disrespect.

Sixteen young people aged between 14–19 years of age participated in this study (7 young women and 9 young men). The young people were located in three diverse settings, with one group (2 women and 2 men) living in a rural and isolated area in Victoria, Australia, categorised as one of the most disadvantaged areas in the region. This group had all left mainstream school, although some were attending Community VCAL. ¹ The second group consisted of 6 participants (3 women and 3 men) residing in a public housing high-rise within a low socio-economic area in inner-city Melbourne. This group were from a Somali background, had English as their second language and had previously, or were still, attending a large public school in the neighbourhood. The last group (2 women and 4 men) were located in one of the most culturally diverse low socio-economic suburbs of Sydney and had attended a mix of public and private schools. Most participants from this group were no longer attending any type of education or training. Three participants from this group identified as Indigenous Australian, one had a Korean cultural background, another Greek and one had migrated from New Zealand. The terms ‘risk’, ‘disengaged’ or ‘marginalised’ were used in this article to describe an experience or a circumstance, not a person.

Interviews were transcribed verbatim and coded using the NVivo data management program. To employ an explorative approach in line with the aim of constructing a more complex understanding of young people’s educational experiences, selected aspects of constructivist grounded theory procedures and tools that fit the needs of this investigation were applied (Charmaz, 2014). Such an approach is of relevance to explorative studies as it relies on the voices of those with direct experience. Categories were established as they emerged from the data through initial line-by-line coding of all data (open coding), after which categories were grouped into more conceptual themes (axial coding). Extensive memo-writing on participants and themes were used to elaborate categories and define relationships between categories. Late in the focused stage of the analysis, key emerging themes related to educational experiences were analysed utilising recognition theory as this framework organised and emphasised important aspects of the categories. Credibility was enhanced through repeated grounded theory cycles of coding and analysing and triangulating data from different groups of study participants and different data generation methods. This study was approved by the research ethics committee at the University of Melbourne.

Educational Experiences and Resistance to School

Even though the young people in this study faced different types of disadvantage (ethno-cultural difference, rurality and geographic inequalities and social marginalisation), all participants had at times been subject to misrecognition at school, such as being made to feel unworthy, disrespected, ignored and humiliated. Participants also had disrupted education experiences and most had been excluded from or left mainstream education at the time of the study. The young people responded to these experiences in three predominant ways: emotions were internalised causing shame, apathy and indifference, or emotions were externalised as anger and opposition. These three themes structure the subsequent sections followed by a fourth theme identified in the analysis; longing for care and validation.

Shame and Self-blame

Katie and Tara’s (pseudonyms are used) experiences at school were like those of many of the young people in the study. The two young women primarily left mainstream school because they had been subjected to persistent peer victimisation and bullying:

Tara: I used to get bullied because I’m Aboriginal. And they would be like, you abo ² cunt, and I bashed them, and then I left. That’s when I started hanging out [on the streets] and then it’s like, I felt like I belonged with that group. Not school.

Katie: Well, I heard a rumour going around my old school that I was like an ice-head. ³ Because I’ve dealt with psychotic illnesses before, so I used to think that there was actual things on my skin, but not from drugs, I used to scratch my skin and that, and I’ve had rumours like I was a slut, when that wasn’t true, and I’ve had people call up my house phone and tell my mum I was pregnant, so I’ve had pretty nasty rumours going around about me.

For Katie and Tara, mainstream school was dominated by a culture of gossiping, scrutinising and evaluating the social practices of other girls, in particular, their appearance and sexual practices. Public humiliation and exclusion were the means by which transgression was dealt with. When asked if teachers had stepped in and mediated in instances of bullying Tara replied; ‘the teachers just do not really care’. Like many of the participants, Tara did not experience school as a place of value and learning, but instead a place where she was undervalued, unsupported and invisible. Likewise for Katie, mainstream school involved significant social and academic challenges that left her feeling incompetent and humiliated, ‘I did not fit in or anything at school (…) I struggled at school, I felt like people hated me. It damaged me a lot, like made me socially awkward’. Katie expressed that she did not feel safe at school or among her peers and that it took all her energy just to get through the day. When asked how she had managed when school was difficult Katie responded; ‘It’s just like I get angry and it’s just like, I am expected to try really hard, it’s just fucking, I don’t know, I don’t get angry at anyone, I just get angry at myself. It’s so hard’. These quotes illustrate how students like Katie internalise their educational challenges, by reframing these as personal failures and responsibilities.

Others left mainstream school due to difficulties juggling expectations at school with personal and family challenges. Dale was forced to leave home and live alone at age 15, after a period of severe tensions between him and his stepdad. Due to loneliness and difficulty coping, he started using drugs that escalated his challenges at school.

Dale: I was going through a lot so I decided to leave, mainstream was too much for me, so I had to do something like [alternative education] just so I can be able to have a couple of days free where I don’t have anything to worry about… Yeah, things were going bad for me, and just some time without having to do something you know. I don’t live at home, so….

Although Dale felt he was unfairly judged by teachers as he tried to manage his difficult family situation, he also expressed embarrassment that he had ‘dropped out’ of mainstream education. Along similar lines, Jason explains that attending alternative to mainstream school feels like a personal failure: ‘I feel like such a loser, does anyone else feel like this? I cannot even do this. I should be able to do it, but I cannot’. Instead of anger towards the institution for neglecting to create a safe and supportive environment where students can thrive, participants, such as Dale, Jason, Tara and Katie, expressed shame because of their social and academic ‘failures’. Several of the participants longed for school to be over so they could begin employment or start a family, concurrently leaving behind past negative educational experiences and seizing new opportunities to ‘get on with their lives’. Despite different reasons, the young people gave for leaving mainstream school—experiences of isolation, bullying, family issues, poor self-esteem, mental health issues or personal challenges—the pattern that ran through these accounts were the absence of support in general, and in particular, a lack of awareness from school personnel of the challenges the young people were facing. This type of misrecognition can be labelled institutionalised invisibility and relates to being deemed an individual unworthy of attention (Honneth, 1996). Despite all of this, the young people stated a desire to learn and to not fall behind, largely blaming themselves for the difficulties they faced.

Anger and Opposition

A notable aspect of participants’ experiences at school is that none of them could describe anything positive about mainstream school. School was purely spoken about with disapproval or at best disinterest. For a variety of reasons, stemming from feeling mocked, judged or disrespected in class, many expressed disregard for the educational system. This led to another reaction to feeling unrecognised - anger and opposition. Kaleb, a young Indigenous man who was recruited through a juvenile justice program, describes school in the following way:

Kaleb: There is disrespect, but also more like abuse of power. It’s more like judgemental, like a lot of people are being judgemental just because we are teenagers and you know, they think that we are narrow-minded, that we just want to cause trouble, but we are the ones that like are more, we just want to talk about what’s right and stuff.

For Kaleb, school is experienced as power abuse, discrimination and misrecognition. Such actions are mostly connected with Honneth’s second mode of recognition, respect, with experiences of disrespect generating feelings of shame, humiliation, anger and indignation. The experience of the educational system as a punitive and unjust system was repeated by many, and few of the participants could recall having felt seen or valued at school: ‘It’s like teachers, if you do something good, they do not compliment you. But if you do something bad, you are in trouble’ (Mike). The feeling of being invalidated and invisible in class created a self-perpetuating cycle of disrespect for teachers and the learning environment, with the young people skipping classes, arguing with teachers and engaging in fights with their peers. As Furlong argues in another context, ‘it is clear that some young people are put in positions at school that effectively promote processes of cultural resistance as survival strategies’ (Furlong, 2005, p. 387).

Kaleb and Leanne were both highly engaged and opinionated when sharing about school, the Australian education system and the irrelevance of the school curriculum. In part, Leanne and Kaleb’s frustration communicates experiencing that their engagement and opinions are shut down and discounted. Comparable to other studies on young people, participants do not perceive school as offering them valuable or relatable knowledge (Smyth & Hattam, 2004, 2010). Instead, they experience school as trying to streamline them, without valuing diversity of learning styles. As Leanne who recently got permanently expelled from school describes as follows:

Leanne: Things aren’t appreciated, if you are not in the system, you are not appreciated. I see myself as quite a smart girl for 17 years of age, and I just got put down constantly at school … [We need] a more positive education system, education is so important and I love learning, I love knowledge, and I have been turned off school when I haven’t even like completed shit all in school because I fucking hated it, and I got treated like a piece of shit and it’s ridiculous, and it’s just not right. Some more money needs to be put into the education system, for kids who don’t particularly fit into this, this and this, and tick that and that and that.

Although Leanne was engaged in certain school activities, the pedagogy at school was felt to not only misrecognise her and her abilities, but also to place restrictions on the skills worthy of recognition. These experiences were echoed by several participants who spoke of not feeling met as learners and lamented the educational system’s inability to value alternative ways of learning, and varied expressions of mastery and skillfulness. Leanne articulates a deep desire to become visible and recognised for her real interests and talents within the school context, to be known and seen by her teachers. The underlying pedagogy and structure of mainstream education are placing young people, who potentially would benefit from more experiential teaching approaches, in a disadvantaged position, as the institutionalised measures of social esteem and what competencies are deemed worthy of recognition favour certain types of quantifiable capabilities (Cuervo, 2020). Such absence or withholding of recognition jeopardises a person’s positive relation to self, which in turn, stunts the emergence of agency and influences how young people perceive their capabilities and themselves as learners (Reay, 2010; Williams, 2012).

Notably, Kaleb and Leanne were cognisant of the unfairness inbuilt in the system for ‘people like them’ and indignant that the odds seemed stacked against them. Unlike other participants, these young people resisted individualising and internalising their ‘failure’ to succeed in mainstream education. Their refusal to accept ascribed subordinate status is shown in their opposition and critique directed at their schooling. They respond to the dominance, stigmatisation and misrecognition experienced with an adversarial attitude towards school, making possible certain kinds of collective resistance cultures, as seen in their anger, frustration, arguing with teachers and peers, absenteeism and presenteeism. The oppositional agency they expressed can be understood as a reaction to not having their way of life and self-understanding validated in their meeting with institutional judgements. Although school resistance is articulated as critique of curriculum, teachers and processes at school, young people such as these are grieving not just the loss of educational outcomes but the limits placed on their ‘scope for being who they are’ (Bottrell, 2007, p. 604). Their display of rebellion and resistance, unfortunately, advanced the misrecognition they experienced from their teachers. In the process of opposition, the social critique articulated concerning the fairness and structure of the educational system becomes obscured, as the very practices underlining their opposition—disrespect for learning environments and absenteeism—is understood by the school as disengagement and disobedience. Hence, these practices reproduce the prejudgement students are trying to resist. However, within their opposition to schooling and stereotyping, we see an attempt at reframing their marginal position and a desire for a more positive representation.

Apathy and Disengagement

Apathy and indifference were another response to managing feelings of alienation at school. Some participants displayed indifference about school as Kylie, who recently was expelled from her second school notes: ‘School does not concern me’. For Sam, school is a place where he can practice his graffiti sketches and meet up with friends; ‘I do not hate school, but I do not like school, like I go there and sleep and draw, that’s it, because I do not listen, I do not care’. Unlike others, these participants are not frustrated with school, they convey no desire to change the educational system; they simply do not care. As school has nothing to offer them, they are waiting school out.

Cultural and racial barriers, feelings of being judged and disrespected, confirmed to participants that school was not a place where they could belong. This can be exemplified in the case of Marcel, a young Indigenous man, who spoke about the experience of segregation at school. Marcel had won a scholarship to a prestigious private school, due to his athletic skills and cultural heritage. Here, he initially experienced mastery and recognition as a skillful athlete. Marcel highlights thriving at the school due to friendships with other ‘scholarship-students’, such as other Indigenous and culturally diverse students on targeted scholarships. Throughout his narrative, he conveyed a strong sense of ‘them’ and ‘us’. Despite attending a private school and succeeding at the school, ‘people like me’ were predominantly experienced as the other scholarship-students; the non-scholarship students were spoken about with sharp contempt. This segregation often leads to fighting and conflict and an overwhelming sense of not fitting in.

Marcel: I used to be a sprinter too. And then I got kicked out of my first school, which was a big sports school. And then I went to St Michael’s Boys and that’s when I started smoking [weed] heaps… I stopped going to classes, I was on a scholarship, for Aboriginal and sport. Footy. And then I started running, I got the fastest time in Australia, I broke the record for 100 metres for 13 [year old’s]… I broke every single fucking record. And then I stopped training because I have no work ethics, I hated training. I kept on racing but I didn’t train, and then everyone just started beating me. Cos I didn’t train, I was unfit. Then I got kicked out… No work ethics. Lazy, so lazy.

Marcel’s self-described laziness can be understood as an act of defiance, displaying an equal amount of disrespect towards the institution as he himself experienced. This is, after all, the second school Marcel was expelled from. However, Marcel’s laziness may also be a euphemism for a combination of expectations of failure and inability to change the situation. Or laziness can be a way for marginalised students to cope with the sense that ‘people like them were not an educational priority’ (MacDonald & Marsh, 2004, p. 157). We do not know what kind of support Marcel was offered at the private school when he started falling behind. However, it is reasonable to assume that Marcel lacked the resources and social, familial and institutional support to succeed. Giving disadvantaged young people scholarships without setting in place support structures required for these students to succeed on such scholarships further reinforces their feeling of unbelonging, failure and marginalisation. Marcel’s story mirrors many of the other participants who described how they, in their meeting with the educational system, were deemed unfit for the system. In turn, the young people lowered their expectations to self-protect from lack of opportunities and misrecognition, and to disengage from what they sensed they were being denied. As Erving Goffman (1952) argued 70 years ago, pervasive social mechanisms resocialise people to accept failure and limited upward mobility. Institutional misrecognition and invisibility can be understood as part of the ‘soft’ institutional repertoire of ‘cooling-out functions’ targeting marginalised students. It is in this context that young people’s apathy can best be understood.

The perceived misrecognition ingrained in the educational system was felt on many levels by participants in this study. First, students felt treated as individuals unworthy of attention and care. In the terminology of Honneth, this can be labelled misrecognition/violation of the student as an ethical person, and understood as a matter of institutionalised invisibility (Honneth, 1996). Second, students relayed experiences of domination, and abuse of power and control. This was empirically seen through stories of unjust treatments, of not having real and genuine opportunities to affect their cases in instances of punishment; which in Honneth’s terminology relates to misrecognition of the student as a legal person. Third, the young people felt met by teachers with pre-judgement, negative stereotypes and low expectations. They reported that their understandings of their problems, strengths and perspectives were not considered; which equates to not recognising a person’s moral authority. Such experiences of misrecognition can, according to Honneth, lead to feelings of shame, anger and frustration, as the young people’s narratives also illustrated. Honneth notes that feelings of injustice often contain an unspoken potential for resistance, which can only be held down by different forms of social control (Honneth, 1996). This is seen in the participants’ absenteeism, opposition and struggles with teachers and peers. However, participants’ demands for recognition were largely ignored or misunderstood, thereby contributing to the young people being expelled from school.

Care and Validation

The young people’s accounts indicate that school was predominantly a site of misrecognition where feelings of unbelonging were exacerbated. There were, however, also glimpses of the opposite occurring, stories of experiences at school where participants felt respected, and teachers took the time to listen to them and act on their concerns. As was discussed in the previous sections, Katie’s experiences in mainstream school were filled with isolation, shame and humiliation. She experienced teachers as indifferent and uncaring. After leaving mainstream school, she started attending Community VCAL, an alternative to mainstream school, which combines classroom tuition with vocational training and work placements. Katie found VCAL a friendlier and more supportive place with nicer peers, less bullying and more supportive teachers.

Katie: The teachers are more one on one, there’s not much people in the class, they can be like, ‘how are you doing with your maths? I’ll help you, I’ll sit down with you’, and at normal school they’d be just sitting at the front on their computers and stuff. Like, he’s [the teacher] harsh but, if we are being shitty, he’ll pull us up on it and just explain, like I want the best for your future. He’s the best teacher I’ve had, that’s actually cared about my future.

Interviewer: Did that make you think that you could do something, in terms of further education?

Katie: Yeah, I didn’t think I could do it and the support I’ve been getting from my teacher just made me want to do better. Like I’ve been trying so much harder the past few weeks, trying to be on time, and stuff, because I’m pushed to be better, and it’s just like when you get complimented doing something good, it just makes you feel good about yourself, so you want to do it again.

Katie feels seen by her new teacher. At VCAL, there were smaller classes, more support and first and foremost teachers who care. She expresses feeling valued by the teacher pushing her further and offering praise and recognition. For Katie, it is the feeling of being valued, respected and visible that creates educational mastery and aspirations, not the other way around. Such favourable relationships with teachers raise the value of young people’s skills, talents and knowledge, providing opportunities for them to meaningfully participate and enhance their self-esteem.

Conceptualising the Role of Relationality in School Disengagement

Schools play a pivotal role not just in young people’s more instrumental orientation towards the future (a place to gain an education), but in shaping or stunting aspirational horizons and imaginings about the future more broadly (Moensted, 2020a). However, ways the young people in this study narrated their experiences at school challenges the construction of educational institutions as an ‘unproblematic mechanism for the creation of opportunity and the construction of productive subjectivities’ (Farrugia et al., 2015, p. 168). Longing for feeling heard, visible and cared for by peers and teachers, as well as experiences of feeling silenced, isolated and disrespected, stunted the participants’ sense of agency, belonging, well-being and capacity to learn. For these young people, schools were brutal places of perpetual failure.

Relationships were a constant reference point for all participants and were explicitly and implicitly identified as integral to their school disengagement. Through the narratives of participants, school disengagement was articulated as a scarcely voiced, complex, gradual, painful, emotional and humiliating process, that was lived in the everyday of relational spaces and shaped by young people’s disposition towards school and vice versa. Schools became places of ‘othering’ (Reay, 2018), through the interactive and cumulative effect of micro-practices legitimising particular types of habitus and knowledge over others, thereby, constituting some actors as inferior or invisible within educational settings. The participants responded with varying degrees of absenteeism and presenteeism, conflicts with teachers and peers, low expectations towards their learning environment and a lowering of educational aspirations. In this dynamic, the young people’s social embeddedness was significant in shaping their resilience and resistance against the alienating practices at play. However, strategies they used to manage and act against experiences of misrecognition in many cases served to reinforce their exclusion.

In the surge of research on school disengagement (Crozier et al., 2019; Cuervo & Wyn, 2012; Furlong, 2013; Reay, 2018; Tarabini & Ingram, 2018), most studies view this mainly as a consequence of individual or structural factors that alienate marginalised students. Here, school disengagement is approached from a social rather than an individual/institutional perspective, inspired by studies taking a socially mediated approach to understanding schooling experiences (Brown & Rodríguez, 2009; Bunting & Moshuus, 2017; Moensted, 2020c). Such a framework offers critical scrutiny of social relations at the root of educational inequality, by responding to student voices and concerns about cultural value systems and institutionalised patterns of misrecognition. Moreover, a socially mediated approach brings out how students themselves experience, react to and negotiate schooling practices, highlighting both their agency and the limits placed upon their opportunities to act. An important contribution of such an approach lies in regarding the young people as active subjects of a lived process, not as mere passive ones. Here, the young people are not held responsible for their ‘educational failures’, nor are they constructed as powerless victims.

Critiques of Honneth have argued that his theory overemphasises ‘micro encounters and interactions’ (Garrett, 2010, p. 1517), largely neglecting structural constraints. However, the foregrounding of relationships with peers and teachers and the interactions between the individual student and their surroundings do not necessarily entail neglecting the impact of structural and material factors, such as unequal distribution of school funding or political and institutional arrangements. Nonetheless, as also noted by Hernán Cuervo (2020), educational redistributive arrangements do not address the cultural domination of minority groups, nor are frameworks favouring structural perspectives effective in capturing how students react to and against exclusionary practices. Moreover, a primary focus on the need for equal opportunities and the fair distribution of resources habitually fails to critically examine how institutional judgements and social relations encourage social exclusion for certain groups of young people.

An interrogation of hierarchies and relationships between individual and collective actors in schools exposes the unequal trajectories educational institutions and authorities produce. According to Honneth, such alienating and reifying forces rooted in capitalist social relations immanent within modern social institutions gain normative legitimacy when left unexamined (Honneth, 2014). As also noted by Luckett and Naicker (2019), social inequality is reproduced in school ‘but “misrecognised” through its supposedly neutral evaluation systems believed to reward individual agency’ (p. 191). Redressing such social and representative injustices includes the development of social policies that intervene in institutional processes preventing the participation of certain groups by privileging and normalising certain dominant values and beliefs (Cuervo, 2014; Luckett & Naicker, 2019). Theories of recognition may be drawn upon to inform practices for social inclusion and the development of pedagogies of recognition and participation. If education is to serve as a public good for the production of social justice, all three of Honneth’s dimensions of recognition need to be addressed. Social inclusion efforts would then involve the fair distribution of opportunities for meaningful recognition across the three dimensions of love, rights and solidarity, exemplified empirically as experiences of care, respect and belonging arising in the context of reciprocal relationships within the school environment. Paying more attention to the social environment between peers at school and the ways it becomes a breeding ground for harsh exclusionary social patterns may further assist culturally marginalised groups to succeed at school. Young people on the margins are generally orientated towards increasing opportunities to have secure relationships with their peers; once addressed enhancing educational attainment may move up the list of priorities.

Conclusion

This article conceptualised school as a key arena for understanding and negotiating one’s place in society, and one of the fundamental fields for constructing a sense of self that is safe and valuable within one’s community (Honneth, 1996). However, for young people who are marginalised, school is problematic in a range of ways that go beyond pure educational concerns but also encompasses significant relational and social challenges.

The young people’s narratives underscore the profound difficulties disadvantaged students face in challenging their marginalised positioning, as these positions are insistently reinforced in their encounter with the educational system and institutional judgements. Three main responses were identified in the young people’s stories: Shame, opposition and apathy. Despite these varying responses, the analysis also showed the young people’s attempts at reframing their marginal position, reversing the misrecognition experienced and revealed their longing for more positive representation. Experiences at school had proven fundamental to all the participants, shaping their worldview, sense of worth and willingness to participate in society more broadly, simultaneously narrowing and negating avenues of belonging and recognition. Such unequal distribution of opportunities to develop skills and abilities that will lead to self-realisation and recognition is central to understanding the reproduction of youth inequality.